Disney going around buying everything is definitely terrible, but there totally needs to be more awareness that the biggest damage Disney has done to the American media landscape happened twenty years ago, and ended up warping a whole generation’s notion of how media is fundamentally supposed to work in the process.
Basically, you can’t “renew” a copyright in order to extend it. “Copyright renewal” used to be a thing, but the purpose of doing so was to prevent the copyright from expiring early, not to extend it beyond the normal statutory limit – and in any event, all that was abolished decades ago, and everybody’s copyrights now last for the full term without the need for renewals.
When most people think of copyright “renewal”, they’re really thinking of copyright extension, which is some legislative fuckery that happened back in the 1990s, and is 100% Disney’s fault.
In a nutshell, Disney didn’t want Mickey Mouse entering the public domain, but there was no formal mechanism for preventing it, and obviously they couldn’t have a legal exception made just for Mickey Mouse; even if they’d bribed enough lawmakers to make it happen, that sort of blatant legislative favouritism would have caused a big hairy scandal.
So what they did instead was lobby for a global copyright extension, applying to all works that were still under copyright at the time – and they succeeded. The Copyright Extension Act of 1998 – sometimes known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, because they weren’t fooling anybody! – tacked an extra twenty years onto the term of all outstanding copyrights, ensuring that Mickey Mouse would be safe until at least 2024.
So here’s the trick: what happened to all the works that would have entered the public domain in 1999? Well, they’d now enter the public domain in 2019 – effectively “freezing” the public domain America for the next two decades. Thanks to Disney’s lobbying, there was a twenty-year span in which no works at all entered the public domain in the United States, apart from the tiny handful that were explicitly released to the public domain by a living author.
If you’re American and under the age of 30, last year is probably the first year in your memory that new works entered the public domain; if you’re under 20, it was the first year in your lifetime that new works entered the public domain. There’s an entire generation of Americans who grew up with a static public domain, thinking that was a normal state of affairs.
Like, I’m not saying that’s 100% responsible for American popular culture being in the condition it’s in, but it’s undeniably a pretty big contributing factor!
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