Bolling on Eternal Copyright
For a long time, it’s really bugged me that certain copyright owners do all they can to keep their creations from ever entering the public domain while not acknowledging how much they owe to all the things that were floating around free in the culture before them.
The biggest offender here, of course, is Disney, because they expend huge amounts of money to keep their characters, especially Mickey Mouse, in copyright, while at the same time making vast amount of money off of characters like Hercules, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and so on. In a just universe, the Disney execs would be woken up one night by the long-dead contributors to all the ideas they’ve appropriated, demanding recompense. Plus interest.
Ruben Bolling expresses this quite well in comic form in today’s Tom the Dancing Bug.
(While I have no love for Disney, I think the true culprits are the politicians who have done their bidding, since Disney’s bound to maximize its profits, whereas the legislators are supposed to be looking out for the public interest. This is one of the things that made Lawrence Lessig turn to attacking corruption in politics.)