In the late 1920s, copyright wasn't automatic: rightsholders had to undertake certain "formalities"-registering with the Copyright Office and displaying correctly formatted notices-and then renew those formalities periodically. Those Mickey cartoons are almost certainly in the public domain anyway. What happens then?Īlmost nothing, if Disney and friends get their way. In 2023, the copyright on those early Mickey cartoons will end (if Congress doesn't repeat the sins of '76 and '98, that is-and you can bet we'll be pulling out all the stops to prevent that). This state of affairs has been lamented at enormous length by people smarter than me, so let's just say that economists, cultural theorists, and copyright scholars are virtually unanimous in viewing retrospective copyright term extension as both absurd and tragic. Nevertheless, in 19, the US Congress gave Disney-and everyone else, including the overwhelming majority of absentee proprietors who didn't know or care about any of this-decades of extra copyright on works that already existed. In the USA, copyright law is supposed to serve an incentive to make new works, and there's no sensible way that getting a longer copyright on something you've already made can provide an incentive to do anything except lobby for more copyright, and sue people who want to make something new out of your creation. Every time the first Mickey cartoons creep towards the public domain, Disney's powerful lobbyists spring into action, lobbying Congress for a retrospective term-extension on copyright, which means that works that have already been created are awarded longer copyright terms. Mickey Mouse is synonymous with copyright term extension, and with good reason. In a mere 24 months, Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain-right?
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