WI: No "Mickey Mouse Law"

What would the world be like if the 1998 law extending copyright never happened? How would our cultural landscape look without it? And what kinds of works could we have made with characters like the famous Mickey Mouse in the public domain? I know that this is more than a little implausible given how big Disney is, but I'm just looking for the impact of the absence of a single piece of legislation.
 
So few people understand what happened you are unlikely to get a response until folks have caught up on teir reading.

I've heard from bar owners & read in the entertainment industry literature that the changes in music copywrite hurt the live music bars. Cover bands were the mainstay for many decades & with these changes it became a lot more expensive for the bands and bar/club owners to keep the live music. I dont know what the truth is there, but I do remember how bands vanished from so many bars in the 1990s & the music played included few covers from the 1950s forward.
 
So few people understand what happened you are unlikely to get a response until folks have caught up on teir reading.

I've heard from bar owners & read in the entertainment industry literature that the changes in music copywrite hurt the live music bars. Cover bands were the mainstay for many decades & with these changes it became a lot more expensive for the bands and bar/club owners to keep the live music. I dont know what the truth is there, but I do remember how bands vanished from so many bars in the 1990s & the music played included few covers from the 1950s forward.

So, we can directly blame this for the rise of EDM?
 
Disney is Richard III: a big family friendly smile which hides dark corporate business tactics. Would I get in trouble for calling it fascist?

Crony capitalism is the essence of fascism, so it even applies in the dictionary definition of fascism. Disney has definitely warped the rules of the marketplace to favor itself particularly as regards intangible monopoly (I refuse to use the expression intellectual property as it is a form of propaganda intended to import your fairly innate feelings about physical property--you know the kind that is rival in consumption and not infinitely replicatable--into the intangible world).

But on the original question, a lot of the world has expired a lot of the things extended by the 1998 copyright law, so that would be the place to look. Gutenberg Australia anyone? And wasn't the copyright on Happy Birthday to you recently revoked?
 
Kinda hypocritical when so much of the Disney library depends on public domain characters.

to be fair, most of those public domain characters that they use are extremely specific interpretations of them, in many cases giving names where none existed: Maleficent was just "an evil fairy" who appears to curse Briar Rose ("Aurora" was first used by Tchaikovsky) at the beginning and then never appears again in the original Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, and none of the Seven Dwarfs had names in the original Snow White, nor did the evil queen (Disney made up the names of all the dwarfs and the queen's name, Grimhilde). for the most part, you won't be penalized for using these public domain characters, you're just not allowed to use these specific versions of them, iirc
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Carl Schwamberger
So few people understand what happened you are unlikely to get a response until folks have caught up on teir reading.

I've heard from bar owners & read in the entertainment industry literature that the changes in music copywrite hurt the live music bars. Cover bands were the mainstay for many decades & with these changes it became a lot more expensive for the bands and bar/club owners to keep the live music. I dont know what the truth is there, but I do remember how bands vanished from so many bars in the 1990s & the music played included few covers from the 1950s forward.



So, we can directly blame this for the rise of EDM?

Cant say for sure. There was a change in the music club/bar scene back in the 1990s. A lot of claims & evidence pointed to the changes in music copyrite. Maybe it was the primary cause, maybe there were other factors at work. The 1990s saw the median age of the Baby Boomers move into the middle age stay home demographic (Tho I stayed out ;) )
The attitude towards getting sloppy drunk bar hopping and driving changed. Maybe those drove the bands out of the bars, maybe not. Back in the 1970s & 80s no self respecting bar in my home area went without a band weekend nights. By 1995 the owners were flailing around with karaoke machines, extra pool tables, comedy nights, canned music & even lamer stuff. The band risers and lights were coming down.
 
Hard to say what the effect would be. The ban on making derivative works without permission & a licence fee in advance makes a lot of works impossible. What they might be is pure speculation.
 
If you'll permit me to grind my axe, one effect that might arise from avoiding the Mickey Mouse Law is that Disney would be forced to focus on developing newer intellectual properties. As a result the executives in charge of Gargoyles might decide to think twice before entering into the debacle that was the Goliath Chronicles. If so they might decide to not shaft Greg Weisman and allow the series to develop according to the vision he had for it, which included several spin-off ideas and story arcs planned (some of which he touched upon with expanded material).
 
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