Even if we allow Disney to own Mickey Mouse forever, there’s a big problem with the current status. The current status is, Disney will keep extending copyrights, and almost nothing will ever enter the public domain again.
First, let me say that I’m a big advocate of intellectual property rights.
First, it’s 20 years, not 14. Second, there is no natural right to any kind of property, other than “might makes right.” Just watch dogs with a bone. All property is what we call a legal fiction, which means it exists based on laws. Oddly enough, you don’t even own your own body, because you can’t sell it. (Yeah, there are exceptions, let’s not quibble.)
Patents and copyrights are justified in two ways. One is the fundamental belief that we should be entitled to the fruits of our own labor (including mental labor). The other is a pact between creators and society with the idea that if we let people have the benefit of a monopoly on their ideas, they’ll create more. Whatever the reason, these laws exist, and any super radical change to the concepts just won’t work in our society or happen in our legislative system. Ain’t gonna happen.
But the problem with copyrights is, right now, nothing goes to public domain unless the creator specifically releases it to the public domain (e.g., using a Creative Commons licence).
Disney has made fortunes using public domain stories from the past. Yet right now, their strong interest in protecting Mickey et. al. has led to a system where EVERYTHING is implicitly copyrighted, and NOTHING goes to public domain until .. well, until never since they’ll keep extending it for Mickey.
The OP’s suggestion is ludicrous. It’s way too expensive to administer (for the IP owners) and meaningless (because how much revenue does Disney get from Mickey Mouse? How to calculate that? There’s no way.) It’s not even a beginner as a contender. Far, far more conservative suggestions have been viciously attacked and won’t fly., like the suggestions from the creator of Creative Commons licences (whose name I don’t recall at the moment).
Even if we let Disney hold Mickey forever (and we’re going to have a hard time prying it from their cold dead fingers), there’s a serious problem. What if we want to use anything from the past, something that didn’t catch on at the time, something that nobody remembers, but that with a modern spin could be brilliant. (The world is full of old ideas coming back to greater success.) Today, if it was created past some date in the early 1900’s, you can’t do it. You can’t do it because it’s implicitly copyrighted, and you’d have to prove that the copyright holders are OK if it became public domain. This is practically impossible.
Do we want a future with essentially no public domain?
my suggestion
Allow copyright holders to annually register to attest that all copyrights they own are still in force. If there is no such registration on record, then copyrights expire 50 years after the author’s death, etc. That is, we follow the same rules as before the most recent extension from 50 years to 70 years, and that we’ll have to do again in 20 years thanks to Mickey.
It’s simple. It follows Berne. It requires relatively little record holding. It makes it easy to find out if something done in the past is still in the public domain. And it protects Mickey.
Some folks don’t think Mickey should remain protected. I acknowledge the arguments, like the one if Stoker Enterprises still held rights for Dracula. (Did Stoker even invent the concept and term vampire? I doubt it, but don’t know.) It’s a valid point. At some point, doesn’t Mickey become part of the culture, rather than corporate property? Good arguments, but practically speaking, there’s too much investment against it, and it’ll never fly in Congress.
Don’t worry; the Twinkie will live on. It may not be called a “Hostess” Twinkie, but someone will be making things called Twinkies, with rights to the original recipe. Meanwhile, there have been copy products on the market for decades, called something else. I don’t remember the biggest brand, but I do remember “Ho Ho’s”, “Ding Dongs”, and “King Dons” being pretty much the same thing (maybe not the same quality). So, don’t worry. Plus if you ever come to a fair in the US, you’ll even be able to get a deep fried Twinkie. I’ve never had one myslef, but … choose your poison.