I don't understand why this wasn't the original strategy. Surely even in 1998, Steamboat Willie itself wasn't making much money. Trademarking Mickey makes much more sense.
The idea that the only reason the US extended the copyright term was because of Disney and Mickey Mouse is one of those clever, edutainment, Ted Talks kind of factoids. It is fun to write about and bring up in threads like this, but in reality, IP(including copyright) had become the predominate strategy of US economic policy in regards to globalization. That isn't to say Disney was not one of many companies fighting hard to extend copyright. Especially due to Micheal Eisner's Disney strategy[1] which, at the time, utilized much of Disney's historical catalog. Most media companies(and US policy makers) are likely more focused on extending IP protections globally at this point. Which is probably one of the reasons we are not seeing a fight about this now.
It is actually interesting now that I think about things like this. I wonder if this is a product of the "Google Knowledge" era. Where quick and clever explanations spread do to their ability to rank higher in a search engine query or social media share.
"In this case, however, some external forces helped expedite the decision, as in Italy, the film was soon to move into the public domain, which meant it would be fair game for pirates and widespread copying. Snow White was released on VHS in 1994, and would break all records for Disney’s animated classics, selling nearly 50 million copies worldwide. It was the last of the early Disney animated films released for home video. Disney was also able to extend the copyright for Snow White."
"The enormous market Disney discovered in selling older films, underscored the “huge potential upside” in stepping up production of new ones. – Michael Eisner"
You're spot on, Steamboat Willie is of virtually no commercial value now - honestly very little that Disney made prior to 1938 has commercial value or had it 1998.
I've wondered myself, and from reading the commentary on Ars (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-i...) and elsewhere, the answer seems to be something like: in 1998 they could do so easily, and why take the risk of letting Steamboat Willie slip? They could, so they did. In ~2015-2018, it wasn't looking nearly so easy (and there was now Big Tech opposition to reckon with), so the calculus changed.
The whole "Mickey Mouse is why we have the DMCA" thing is overstated to the point where I'm tempted to call it an urban legend. There were a lot of forces aligned in the 90s to extend copyright. Disney was one of them, but it was a lot more than just Mickey.
It was more about laying the groundwork for an intellectual property driven global economy, in which the U.S.'s major export would be IP. Keep in mind in the 90s, that's where people thought the world was going; we were deindustrializing and there was a (false) sense that everyone in the first world was going to become a "knowledge worker" while all the unpleasant jobs could be offshored. (But, somehow, the countries we were offshoring to were never going to develop IP industries of their own; it always seemed to be a one-way circuit.)
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: the DMCA does more to protect the little guy than it does to protect big companies.
If you're a big company, and you find that someone is infringing on your copyright, you've always just been able to throw lawyers at the problem until it goes away, DMCA or no. Individuals, especially those who aren't rich, don't have that option. Until the DMCA, individuals had basically no recourse for copyright infringement that didn't involve paying for a lawyer they couldn't afford.
Here's something that came up recently that involved a group I'm part of. On Facebook, I'm part of a private women-only group for a particular fandom. Some members of the group are also mods and admins of one of the largest (mixed-gender) Facebook groups for that fandom, and there are a handful of toxic banned people who really have it out for them. One of them runs a meme page. So, one day, one of the members of the women's group, who's also the lead admin of the larger group, posts pictures of a cosplay photoshoot she had done at a con to the group. The photographer, by the way, was the admin of the women's group. Turns out that one of these toxic banned assholes had a mole in the women's group, and he posted her pictures all over the meme page along with a bunch of sexually harassing comments and insults about her weight.
Thanks to the DMCA, that problem went away fast. The photographer, who was livid that people would use her photos to harass her friend like this, filed DMCA complaints on every photo the meme page posted. Facebook took them down in about an hour. Toxic asshole posts them again, another DMCA complaint, another swift takedown. I'm assuming, by the way, that this got the meme page guy a 24-hour ban from Facebook, because that's usually what happens on a second offense. 24 hours later, the whole meme page went down... I'm guessing the owner took it down right after he got back from his ban.
I've heard an argument it's more about Winnie-the-Pooh.
There's definitely a market for books, cartoons and merchandise directly adapted from Milne's original book, especially if they're cheaper than Disney's material.
They wouldn't lose much revenue from Steamboat Willie entering the public domain. But 20+ years of content entering the public domain could've caused a couple of percent of revenue to be lost annually by now. That's a chance they'd rather have nipped in the bud, and subsequently did.
