They also took works that were *already* in the public domain, and yanked them out.  It’s a case currently being decided by SCOTUS, not sure when a result will be announced.  Very important case:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_v._Holder

I don’t want people to be afraid of taking what i made decades before that point to make their own spinoffs or remixes.

At the same time I also want to get paid for what I  do, so there’s a balancing point that has to be reached and right now what we have is nowhere near a satisfactory balance point. You don’t have people able to draw from cultural elements that they feel are relevant to them and instead have to look at the nineteenth century (then worry over whether Disney beat them to it and will sue them into a race of who can outlast who in legal fees no matter who’s legally correct. Hint: You won’t win.)

Oh sure you could always throw the middle finger to Law. I’m sure Fanfiction.net could be shut down with a couple phone calls if anyone of the hundreds of rights holders that site serves as an aggregated infringement claim on could see an angle on how any personal positive would outweigh the collective bad press (assuming there isn’t some sort of agreement in play or that it isn’t covered undr  Fair Use…. but again like with making your own remixed tail of Alice you would have to make sure to avoid Disney Introduced concepts… and even then there’s a chance, slim but still there, they might sue anyway just to scare off any investment money and keep you from bothering them.)

Someone better versed in the world and Law mind seeing if I’m anywhere close to the mark, or if the tinfoil’s cut bloodflow from my head again.

Can we get a Kickstarter going as a Superfund to try lobbying Congress with to change copyright to something a little more sane yet public domain isn’t frozen?

With a goal of a trillion dollars? You’re bidding against several large industries.

Go back to… oh hell.. even just the pre ’78 law with a provision that copyright can be renewed by the known holder? That way Disney can set a few suits down to keep their catalogs protected (as can anyone else, especially those studios/record lables that still feel they need to protect these now aged bits of Library kit.)

Wouldn’t have to shorten it to a fifteen year period (which I personally like since even though most studios would demand their catalogs of stuff be kept one never knows.)

However the depressing thing is anything this fund would put together, disney could match or exceed with pocket change. And that’s just one company of hundreds that would want copyright left as is. Broken and Forever minus a day.

Everything — everything — up to 1971.

That would include… well, let’s look at Box Office Mojo’s inflation-adjusted BO chart. Gone With the Wind, The Sound of Music, The Ten Commandments, Doctor Zhivago. Every feature-length Disney animated movie from Snow White to The Aristocats, along with shorts like Three Little Pigs and The Band Concert. Most classic Looney Tunes cartoons — the Hunting Trilogy, One Froggy Evening, What’s Opera Doc?, Duck Amuck, Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, forty Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner shorts. All 114 Hanna-Barbera Tom and Jerry shorts.

Going back to live-action film, there’s Ben-Hur, The Graduate, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady. Now let’s look at AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies list: Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, The Wizard of Oz, On the Waterfront, Singin’ in the Rain, It’s a Wonderful Life, Sunset Boulevard, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Some Like It Hot, All About Eve, The African Queen, Psycho. Stanley Kubrick’s filmography, just for kicks: Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange. Every Marx Brothers movie. And Now for Something Completely Different. The Producers. Arsenic and Old Lace. MASH.

That’s just film. Novels? The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Catch-22, Animal Farm, 1984. Lolita and Gone With the Wind, again. The Chronicles of Narnia. Five Judy Blume books. Every non-posthumous Little House book. Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. Every Dr. Seuss book up to The Lorax. Roald Dahl’s early books, up to Fantastic Mr Fox. The Outsiders. Lord of the Flies.

Comic books! Action Comics #1-407, Detective Comics #1-418, Fantastic Four #1-117. More importantly, commercially speaking, the characters. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Daredevil, Professor X, the original X-Men lineup. Most famous enemies of the above — Mr. Freeze is arguable, I guess, seeing as the version in “Heart of Ice” is almost a different character. Basically everything from the Golden and Silver Ages.

How about music? If roughly the entire Beatles catalog isn’t enough, there’s most of Elvis’s biggest hits, Led Zeppelin’s first four albums, every 1960s protest song, every Lovin’ Spoonful single, the Jackson 5′s “Greatest Hits,” Rock Around the Clock, Chuck Berry’s biggest hits, every Buddy Holly song, American Pie. Loads more that someone who knows more than me about music can name.

Television? Let’s warm up with the cartoons. The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, Yogi Bear, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, Spider-Man, the first Astro Boy series, Gigantor, Tomorrow’s Joe. Not as impressive as the other fields, but not bad. We’d still have to wait a few more years for Yamato and five more for Gundam 0079 before we hit the 1980s.

Now for the live-action TV! I Love Lucy, Star Trek: The Original Series, The Prisoner. Doctor Who’s first eight seasons, including all of what exists of the first two Doctors and Three’s first two seasons, the latter of which introduced the Master. A couple seasons of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson — no more, for the same reason as Doctor Who. Howdy Doody, the original Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Bewitched, Batman, The Honeymooners, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the original Dragnet, The Avengers, Gilligan’s Island, Get Smart, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show. 2.5 seasons of Sesame Street and 4.5 of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. 26 episodes of All in the Family, 38 of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and a crapload of soap operas and game shows.

—–

All of that would be public domain with a forty-year duration. And four and a half years ago, Cory reported on a study indicating an optimal term of fourteen (14) years. If that were the case, we could change 1971 in that second paragraph to 1997. As in, Buffy the Vampire Slayer up through “Ted,” Titanic, The Fifth Element, Cube, Men in Black, Gattaca, Austin Powers, The End of Evangelion, Princess Mononoke, Sailor Stars, Revolutionary Girl Utena, GaoGaiGar, Dragon Ball GT, El-Hazard 2, Martian Successor Nadesico, Final Fantasy VII, Quake II, Riven, Symphony of the Night, and HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE.

Oh, and everything that preceded any of those.

God damn.

Pay up.

It was Lawrence Lessig who lost out in Eldred vs Ashcroft which attempted to challenge the constitutionality of the act in question, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, when he failed to follow the Supreme Court’s argument and did not catch on to who exactly was being injured:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft

so we have lost the opportunity to get this monstrous law repealed as we lost it in the highest court.

How I lost the Big One by Lawrence Lessig:

http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp

start quote:—————————————————————————-

There were two points in this argument when I should have seen where the court was going. The first was a question by Kennedy, who observed,

Well, I suppose implicit in the argument that the ’76 act, too, should have been declared void, and that we might leave it alone because of the disruption, is that for all these years the act has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I just don’t see any empirical evidence for that.

Here follows my clear mistake. Like a professor correcting a student, I answered,

Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing in our copyright clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding progress. Our only argument is, this is a structural limit necessary to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the copyright laws.

That was a correct answer, but it wasn’t the right answer. The right answer was to say that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written about it.
Kennedy wanted to hear it. And here was where Don Ayer’s advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss.

end quote —————————————————————

Or is there another wrinkle?

Oh I see. The Cornell Copyright information stipulates that works published between 1923 and 1964 with a notice, and a renewal are copyrighted until 95 years after the publication date– which is, at a minimum, 2018.

That sucks