If no shirt you see, you Pooh be free
Shirt of red, Disney lawyers ahead
i think 14 is the number of years generally bandied about. ( i’ve heard lifetime as well, but think the points that @Brainspore made about that are well put. )
but even in the current system with “protection” long past lifetime: lots of marvel and dc artists don’t get paid the money they should for their comic creations. and disney doesn’t pay some of its authors at all.
for shorter timelines – timelines that empower new creators, not the corporate landlords – i honestly have some faith in humanity. if fandom hears the original creator is alive, and that disney is making millions from their work – people will still find ways of supporting those creators because people want and value that kind of work.
in your hypothetical for instance: your original sketches would be worth bank; and any new work you do would benefit from all of the marketing others are doing of your earlier work.
We’re probably not as far apart in our view of this as it might appear, though I still think 14 years is not enough time. Sometimes it takes 20-25 years for something to find its audience. While it would be nice to sell a few thousand dollars worth of my hypothetical Captain Wonderful graphic novel and original art when the movie comes out, why shouldn’t I get some of the millions from the box office and merchandising sales too? And relying on the goodwill of fans … that business model hasn’t worked out so well for hundreds of authors, artists, and comic book creators, etc.
On the other hand, I wish Disney would release Mickey Mouse, and the ER Burroughs family, Tarzan (to name just two examples); they’ve done a poor job over the years caretaking those characters, and I’d love to see someone actually do something amazing with them. I’m personally looking forward to several copyrighted characters falling into the PD, so that I can play with them, and yes, maybe make a little money with my vision for them. That’s sort of why everyone wants stuff to fall into public hands anyway, isn’t it? To unleash those properties’ potential, both artistically AND financially.
the thing is … most creators don’t even get that now!
these cases are not because the term of copyright is too short. if anything, what happens now is that big companies get the rights from the creators, and those people are locked out from using or properly profiting from their creation ever again.
and while i do think you’re right – that with the original copyright term restored there might be some cases where a company might make millions unfairly – i think worrying about a possible exploitation of a work doesn’t negate the current ( and quite common ) exploitation that does occur with the copyright being too long.
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Copyrights are weaker than patents. Copyright violations need to be knowing. If you make something that works in patent protected way it is in violation even if you didn’t know about the patent when you made the thing, or even if the patent hadn’t been granted.
Copyrights on the other hand are broader then patents, patents need to cover things that actually work (and originally couldn’t be mathematical proofs or other things that “existed apart from human invention”, so no software patents were valid until IBM and others hammered the patent office until they gave up and said “fine, patent all the software you want, we’ll just rubber stamp it all until you get tired of it!”).
My personal feelings are copyright should be a limited time, but somewhere around a human lifetime is probably fine, and I hate software patents and would prefer them to be 0 years, but failing that shorter is better. I have few options about mechanical patents or medical patents, although bringing new drugs to market is very expensive so if you can’t patent them we need to either make that process cheaper or find another way to fund that process.
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Tarzan is in the public domain and has been for several years now. So is Mickey Mouse’s predecessor Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. My nephew decided to celebrate the latter by posting an animated short to YouTube where Oswald smokes weed and flips Disney the finger.
The legal status of Mickey himself will probably be a little more complicated since the Walt Disney corporation has used Mickey’s image as a trademark for decades and trademarks don’t automatically expire.
Ehhh…sort of? Knowledge and intent isn’t a specific element of proving copyright infringement, but it’s just assumed that if someone writes a 5,000 word short story and it’s nearly identical to an existing story, there’s almost no chance that that happened by accident. So in infringement lawsuits, the plaintiff will often focus on proving that the defendant was aware of the original work. This has proved to be problematic with music in the modern day, because with the advent of digital music and streaming, it’s almost always the case that an accused infringer either heard the original or had the opportunity to hear it, so the focus of those cases is shifting to whether or not the element(s) of music that are similar are significantly original enough to warrant copyright protection in the first place. Still…“knowing” is not really an element that has to be proved.
As far as copyright being weaker than patents, I think that’s a subjective assessment that depends on what exactly you mean. Patents are certainly a lot more formal in that they get pretty specific about what is protected with any given invention. On the other hand, patents also for that reason often aren’t that hard to get around. You just have to study the patent closely enough to figure out what you need to change in order to not violate it. You can’t really do that with copyright. Or…you can, but you might very well find yourself slapped with an infringement suit anyway and have to go argue in court that yours is different enough that it’s not infringement, or that it falls under a fair use exception, or whatever. And that can happen with patents too, of course, but I don’t know that one is weaker or stronger than the other. Also, copyright law along with the DMCA has been used to bake in a lot of the protections into the infrastructure of social media sites like YouTube so that it often doesn’t matter if your work doesn’t actually infringe. If someone says it does, you’re going to get your video taken down.
Lastly, a “human lifetime” is a shitty way to measure things. If you measure it by the actual creator’s life, like we do now, then you have no fucking idea how long the copyright is going to last, and that’s just weird to me. S.E. Hinton wrote the Outsiders when she was in high school. She was 18 when that book was first published. She’s now 74 and still alive. If she lives to be 100, which is very possible, that book won’t be in the public domain until 2118. That book will have been afforded 151 years of copyright protection. That’s insane. If instead you just mean that the length of a copyright term should be roughly the life span of a generic person, then pick a number and just say that number. 80 years, 70 years, 95 years, whatever it is you mean, say that. I still think that’s too long. Is 14 the right number? I don’t know, some people have done research and said that’s optimal, I don’t think I agree. 28? 56? I don’t know. Let’s pick a reasonable number and use that. I don’t really care, I just know that the current length is insane.
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… people do dream of making millions with their creations, but generally they dream of making millions immediately, not forty years later 
No more frivolous ice cream lawsuits, then. I didn’t know until today that Superman ice cream was a Michigan/Midwest thing. I thought it was everywhere.
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