I've heard that all you really need to know to understand copyright law (at the congressional level) is that (works containing) Mickey Mouse will never (be allowed to) enter the public domain (through copyright term expiration).
The comment you're replying to made a good point about how aggressively Disney has lobbied to keep extending copyright law to keep Mickey Mouse and such out of the public domain, whereas your comment refers to "intellectual property", which by drawing an incorrect analogy with physical property leads people into sloppy and incorrect thinking about the issues, and imprecisely lumps together several distinct areas of law, like copyright and trademark. With all due respect, your comment is one of the most ignorant things I have ever heard about intellectual property law.
How does any discussion of Mickey Mouse not touch upon "several distinct areas of law, like copyright and trademark"? When Disney forced that daycare company to remove the Mickey cartoons from the walls of the daycare center the issue was use of a trademarked image. With or without copyright extensions that daycare center will never have Mickey Mouse cartoons on the wall without Disney's express permission.
>With or without copyright extensions that daycare center will never have Mickey Mouse cartoons on the wall without Disney's express permission. //
Trademarks are supposed to be to indicate the _origin_ of goods or services. The use of an image of a mouse on a nursery wall is highly unlikely to create any confusion in anyone of sound mind that Disney are providing the service of that nursery - if there is a potential for doubt then a simple disclaimer can alleviate that (yes on the wall if necessary).
After copyright expiration of the original cartoons from which a Mickey Mouse like image might be copied there is no reason that a sane application of trademark law would prevent a nursery from using such an image.
Now "famous" marks often get special treatment but this swings both ways. If you don't use an actual Disney mark [as opposed to a simple image of one of their characters which isn't a trademark] then people know that it's not actually from Disney. Indeed just being affordably priced is sometimes all the indication that one needs.
Yes, could you link me up please? Was it by any chance settled.
However, it's not at all a surprise to me. I would note that I say "there is no reason that a sane application of trademark law would prevent a nursery from using such an image" (emphasis added).
No, I like long copyright terms. They ensure that there is a very good chance that I will never be subjected to advertisements featuring Calvin and Hobbes promoting breakfast cereal and toys.
I'd be OK with giving different terms to the different rights that compose the bundle of copyright rights. Make the derivative work right term for literary and artistic works very very long, but make the reproduction right term short. That would give the public the benefit of wide, affordable (or free) availability of literary and artistic works, without making them available for advertisers to use to rape the memory of my youth.
What about fan fiction and mashups? I think that things like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and maybe Pride and Prejudice and Zombies should be permitted sooner than unlicensed advertising.
Legally there's no distinction between the two (and how could you draw a line? HPMoR is in many ways one big advert for the centre for modern rationality).
But yeah, I think the good of unlicensed reuse of characters is worth putting up with the bad.
Maybe you'd have to provide a separate right to the characters in a fictional work, so that characters can be reused in other fictional works, but not in a way that implies that the original character/author supports some other entity or product, such as the aforementioned Calvin and Hobbes promoting cereal and toys.
Like I said, I'm pretty sure that would rule out HPMoR (Harry might not explicitly join a rationality organization, but the story exists to promote them).
HPMoR has significant value as a standalone work of fiction. There's a lot of new creative work. It's possible to read HPMoR on fanfic.net without ever knowing that the author, "Lesswrong," is Eliezer Yudkowsky, or what his affiliation is with the Center for Applied Rationality. I'd say that's a far cry from Harry appearing in a breakfast cereal commercial.
Of course, I probably agree with you that it would be much easier to avoid making the distinction at all. I'm just trying to point out that, if someone insists on making the distinction, it's possible to draw the line exactly where I want it ;-).
And even if long copyright terms were retained for commercial purposes, shorter terms for non-commercial use, like what most of the OP discusses, is still something I want.
I disagree. One of the most popular uses of any kind of artistic work, especially with widespread use of the Internet, is remixes. What you propose does not solve the absurd situation of The Beatles' works being older than the majority of people alive today[1], yet still (legally) unusable in remixes/mash ups/etc without permission.
[1] Assuming most people are < 40 years old, without anything to back me up.
Long copyright terms is different than retroactively applying copyright terms. How does extending the copyright of works created in the 1920s encourage production of new works?
