Infographic: Disney wants infinite copyright

Here's a telling little infographic (original is a scalable vector graphic) — "Disney wants infinite copyright." I once was on a standards committee with a Disney TV executive who was convinced that every time Disney broadcasted an old show, the copyright clock started over for that program — so if you put a 50 year old cartoon on TV, it would get another 95 years of fresh copyright.

There's a small technical niggle about the "When will Mickey Mouse enter the public domain?" campaigns, and it's this: Mickey Mouse, the character, is a trademark. Trademarks stay proprietary for as long as they're in use in commerce (but trademarks only protect against misleading commercial uses, not noncommercial use or commercial uses that don't mislead). The copyright question with Disney is more properly, "When will old Mickey Mouse cartoons enter the public domain?"

Of course, even that misses the real, hard question to put to Disney. That's this: "Almost all the movies made when the first Mickey cartoon was made are rotting and running to slime. No one can bring them back to life because they can't even figure out who they belong to, 78 years after the fact. Why should all of those movies vanish so that you, Disney, can go on making money off of less than one percent of the creative works from the 1920s?"

Link

(Thanks, Pablo!)