It feels completely unreasonable to me. There's no reason why Disney should be given an exception when others aren't. It's idiotic to suggest that they should get special treatment just because their IP is commercially valuable.
The Steamboat Willie article is specious. Thanks to a failure to register copyrights (back when those things mattered) the Fleischer studio "Superman" cartoons are in the public domain. The world did not end. People may use and sell these cartoons, but they still have to be careful not to run aground against the Superman trademark.
The same thing would happen to Steamboat Willie.
I see more value in having Disney pay an appropriately large amount of money to keep their IP than I see in making sure that their specific content gets into the public domain.
Who cares about steamboat willy if Disney is going to fight tooth and nail over it? It's everything else that will expire into the public domain that I care about.
It's not such a big deal applied to films; the amount in the government coffers is swollen by less than the extra Disney fans have voluntarily spent on old films, but no great loss is suffered by those who aren't willing or able to pay Disney's asking price. But establishing a principle that corporations should be able to retrospectively extend the fixed-term of their IP for cash would be particularly dangerous when it comes to things like patents...
| I don't see any benefit to mankind if people were
| suddenly free to print Mickey Mouse onto t-shirts
| and sell them.
I can't tell if you're just trolling or uninformed, but there are always a handful of posts in these discussions that don't understand the differences between patent, copyright and trademark.
I haven't really absorbed his argument, but he seemed pretty sure about it, and that we needed something else to (legitimately, in both our opinions) protect Disney's ability to control their brand even if copyright expired. He recommended giving Disney something very much like "right of publicity" for Mickey Mouse so they can still control the character, while allowing lots of old stuff to still enter the public domain.
Even if specific instances of Mickey Mouse's likeness are trademarked, I have a hard time believing that someone could be selling "Mickey Mouse" t-shirts on the street and not be in a risky legal grey zone.
[I'll also note that as an IP lawyer he probably has a rather conservative view of this. Thinking from Disney's perspective they don't want any trademark lawsuit to be in a legal grey zone. They want them all to be slam-dunks so that they can get their way.]
From Wikipedia: "It is sometimes erroneously stated that the Mickey Mouse character is only copyrighted."[1]
I could have avoided this one. :)