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If you rent a house, and your lease expires, that’s not the landlord stealing the house back from you.
If you can't make a profit off of a licensed property after 35 years of exclusive control, you've done something horribly wrong. If you sit on a licensed property and do nothing with it for decades, it should be allowed to revert to someone else, or better yet go into public domain.
Of course, what they should do is have the copyright expire after 35 years. Then if the original creators want to make sequel at that point they're entitled to -- just like everybody else.
This happens ALL THE TIME. 2001 A Space Odyssey, Heavy Metal (1981-Blue Oyster Cult), Rocky (1976) airing on TV without Eye of the Tiger, It's a Wonderful Life was public domain but distributors needed to pay for the soundtrack. TV shows like Married with Children and Dave airing in syndication with different opening theme songs. etc.
All over archive.org you'll find tons of classic films but with the soundtracks stripped out.
What the termination allows me to do as the creator of that character in this analogy is say - charcircuit isn't doing anything with my character for 35 years - I'm going to take back control and maybe do something myself with it or license it to someone else to do something with...
“Derivative works” exception – although a successful termination causes all of the rights to revert, this will not affect exploitation of derivative works created during the lifetime of the agreement, even after that agreement has been terminated. Once the agreement has been terminated, the grantee (see the glossary) may continue after termination to utilize “derivative works prepared under authority of the grant before its termination…[consistent with] the term of the grant” (to quote from the U.S. Copyright Act). This means that if, for example, an author granted a company a 50-year exclusive license to create a movie based on the author’s novel, that company can continue to use and exploit the movie even after the author successfully terminates the exclusive license. The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current.
[0]: https://rightsback.org/faq/#So.2C_I_get_all_of_my_rights_bac...
Imagine the chaos if someone were able to say ‘whoops, all those books you bought are no longer sellable!’.
Imagine if Alan Cox took back all the bits of Linux he wrote and decided they were no longer to be licensed under the GPL!
…although maybe it’s only a matter of time before that second thing happens somewhere? “The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current” seems problematic for open source software (or commercial software! What if the original authors of the FAT file system decided to try to start getting royalties from new derivative works?…)
From https://rightsback.org/faq/#What_kinds_of_agreements_cannot_... , works for hire are not covered, which includes most 1990s software (though I do still wonder about open source licenses):
Under the U.S. Copyright Act, copyrighted works that qualify as “works made for hire” are subject to special rules that govern who becomes the first owner of copyright in a work. For regular works, the person who creates the work becomes the first owner of copyright. However, for “works made for hire” either the employer or person who commissioned the work becomes the first owner of copyright. Neither of these transfers of rights from the author to the employer or commissioning party, which occur by operation of the Copyright Act, nor any subsequent agreements entered into by the employer or commissioning party in relation to the work, may be challenged by the author or their family members.
There’s a whole lot more nuance there, but notably “A contribution to a collective work” is allowed to be a work for hire.
If it weren't for Disney's success at regulatory capture, the copyright would be expired and anybody would be able to produce a fictional work featuring Roger Rabbit, including Disney.
Is 35 years not long enough? Disney knew the terms going in.
I think it should go back to the 25-year automatic ownership back to the actual creator.
Well in the case of the very thing we're talking about, the point was apparently to make $330 million in a single year in the 1980s
Oh, wait, I actually don't care about that at all.
It has been 35 YEARS and Disney's failed to do anything else with the IP. The original creator wants to make a sequel, and now he's able to.
Also: you mentioned a scenario where you might make a video game and wanted to be able to distribute it in perpetuity. Unless you based the video game on some pre-existing creative work that someone else came up with (Roger Rabbit's Raucous Riot or something), you WILL retain the rights. Termination of copyright doesn't apply to works made for hire [0] (i.e., if you pay your employees to create the IP, it doesn't apply).
TLDR; fuck the mouse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976#Terminat...
Licensing assets like rocks, foliage, random textures or sounds is extremely common in the game industry, even among big games.