When will Mickey Mouse enter the public domain?

gedaliyah@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 276 points –
This iconic mouse is weeks away from being in the public domain
deseret.com

This iconic mouse is weeks away fromn being in the public domain Jan. 1, 2024, is the day when 'Steamboat Willie' enters the public domain

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That would just result in corporations like Disney ripping off independent artists.

Fucking thank you.

The whole "copyrights should be abolished" trope is regurgitated by people who have clearly never created anything in their life. For artists, musicians, and other content creators, copyright is vital to our lives.

If you think Disney is powerful now, imagine what Disney would be like if no other creators had any legal protection at all.

The problem is that copyright law is never used by the small artists to protect their work, it's only used by big corporations to put down the small artists, fuck with each other and find loop holes to abuse of it.

There's what it should be for and what it's actually used for.

You're approaching a relevant part (that big corporations have an overwhelming power advantage in this "negotiation"), but "small artists never use copyright law" is just wrong:

Without copyright law they couldn't even sell their content (or more accurately: they could sell it, but the big corp could simply copy it and sell it better/cheaper due to the economics of scale).

So without copyright the smaller artists would be even more boned than they are right now.

There should be real punishments for companies that do stuff like issue fraudulent DMCA takedowns.

That I can get behind!

Right now the law allows them to basically say, "oops, we kinda thought we owned that. Our bad." And walk away only to issue an identical takedown the next week.

I have a video series that gets a DMCA claim on the intro (that I made) every single time that I have to submit a counter claim. It's always overturned, but I have zero recourse to stop it from happening.

I know numerous small artists who use copyright to protect their work and get paid when people use their music in streams/videos, take down misuse of their graphic work, work with publishers to license their work, etc.

Copyright works fairly well for small creators.

Of course corporations abuse it like every other law. We don't say that home ownership should be abolished because landlords are shitty.

copyright law is never used by the small artists to protect their work

Tell me you're not an artist without telling me you're not an artist.

My friend, this is precisely the kind of thing I was alluding to in my previous post when I said "regurgitated by people who have clearly never created anything in their life." I promise you that as an artist I have used copyright law to protect my work, and so has just about every artist I know. I don't even know what you're imagining to make you say something so patently false.

It's funny how often that argument comes up in FOSS (Free and open source software) circles where people just claim copyright is fundamentally wrong, but at the same time complain when someone violates any FOSS license (all of which depend on copyright to be enforcable).

These two takes aren't incompatible. It is possible to want to abolish copyright, while wanting everyone to comply to existing rules while they aren't abolished yet.

Sure, but in most of these discussions the ones arguing for "getting rid of copyright" mostly just mean "stop big companies from owning everything". When mentioning that FOSS licenses depend on copyright to work it's usually some form of "we'd have to find a way to still make them work ...".

Right but this is a child's solution to an adult problem, as you point out

You say Disney would be better without copyright at the same time we see Disney spending billions on lobby to make copyright almost eternal.

To think that Disney would be happy if every artist could create, enhance and improve a Marvel version for themselves

???

That's not what I said at all.

Did you reply to the wrong person?

If you think Disney is powerful now, imagine what Disney would be like if no other creators had any legal protection at all.

You say Disney would be better without copyright at the same time we see Disney spending billions on lobby to make copyright almost eternal.

Wow. That's not what I said at all. You quoted me and you still got what I said wrong.

It's because this entire take is just from the "corporations bad" crowd and that's literally as far as they take their thought process.

Any serious look at copyright and IP laws shows they badly need updating, across the spectrum.