Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
The public has no more claim on Mickey Mouse than they do over somebodies family farm that’s been handed down for generations.
This is different than patents because there is only so many ways to make Aspirin. Giving a time limited patent after which point all of society gets to benefit allows progress.
I see no such valid time limitation for fiction. There are endless ways to create a story.
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Saying that there are endless ways to create a story does not make it so. Given that I've read *two* independently created stories where, due to stringently interpreted and enforced perpetual copyright, creators discover that they've run out of new ideas (one was about music the other about stories)...
As for Disney it can be argued that it has benefited from public domain so it should contribute to public domain. For example I am not upset that Disney was not required to pay the heirs of Hans Christian Anderson to make
The Little Mermaid since the story was out of copyright but I do think that it's fair that the film also enter the public domain as time passes.
As someone who has not inherited the family farm, I'm touched that you think that there are still family farms being handed down for generations. BTW in Canada there was an attempt to keep dairy farms as family farms in the 1970's by introducing a new intangible property* that controlled who could produce and sell milk called Milk Quota. Current copyright laws are a much less contentious issue.
*Property being simply defined as something that can be bought and sold.