Oops. Sorry for the extremely long double post.
Sir, I say sir, I demand satisfaction! Them’s fightin’ words!
Compulsory licensing would be a big win for record companies, yes. But it would also be a win for consumers. People don’t just pirate music because they’re cheap; they also do it because they don’t have to buy an entire CD for $18 (including jewel case, paper insert, annoying plastic sticker, and 9 tracks of filler) to get one song.
I believe people would happily pay 10 cents a minute for reliable, legal song downloads - it’s convenient and economical for the consumer (a CD for less than $8 if you want the whole thing), and the record company gets paid. The move from buying albums to buying individual songs would also encourage the labels not to fill albums up with lame tracks.
Software becomes obsolete even more quickly. Windows 98 was top of the line 5 years ago, but good luck trying to find it in stores today. A lot of old software won’t even run on today’s computers, so it’s worthless to everyone but nostalgic hobbyists, but it’s still protected by copyright for decades to come.
Way to take the steam out of that one!
Seriously, considering how little artists make from album sales, it’s not unlikely that illegal sharing benefits them more through concert and merchandise sales than it harms them through loss of album royalties.
Now, some people say they’ve been exposed to new bands through Kazaa, and I won’t make that claim myself. I’ve never found the “show me some new bands” button on Kazaa, only the searches for artist and song names. But I’ve been exposed to new music by bands I’ve only briefly heard of, and often it’s convinced me to support that band. My ears perk up and my wallet opens at the news that Band X is coming to the Gorge, simply because I’ve heard their music through illegal downloads.
Yes, but I dislike being branded as a criminal if I’m not doing the crime. A solution that would work along those lines is a website sponsored by the RIAA that provides cheap songs, like $0.05 a track, or a low monthly subscription fee. The RIAA refuses to do that, because they stand to gain much more $$ by compulsory licensing and DRM.
Software also stands to gain much, much more by public domaining their work than artists, simply because no one who can afford new software would use out-of-date programs, while those who can’t afford it wouldn’t buy it anyway. That’s why ID has open sourced all of their games up to quake 2. More name recognition for them!
I’d like to add that this is only industry artists who have contracts with record companies who get virtually all the sales from albums. Independent artists who make their own albums benefit immensely. But then, they usually sell more albums at concerts than anywhere else.
Sounds good to me too. Maybe if I thought about it deeply I’d find some holes in it, but on the surface, it sounds just right.
And sometimes, in a limited sense, the word of mouth that comes from bootleg music can work in the favor of the artist.
But tell me—will your friends be so happy for the “publicity” when they make their first CD, and it doesn’t sell so well because everyone’s stealing it off Kazaa instead of buying it?
No, I hear it so often because cheapskates and people who want something for nothing (or people who think that artists really don’t “work”, so what they do should be “free”) are all too common.
Oh come on. How often does that really happen? If ONLY it happened that way—boy, a lot of us would be sittin’ pretty.
But it hardly ever happens that way.
A more common scenario: Artsy person goes to school, gets expensive education in music/art/film/writing/etc. Artsy person waits tables while they write their novel or try to get a gallery to show their work. Artsy person spends 10-15 years (sometimes less, sometimes more) working and struggling to make ends meet while hoping they can make their student loans. (Or, artsy person never did go to expensive college, but works at a job they never liked all that much, and pours all their free time into artsy endevour.)
After years of rejection and struggle, finally, artsy person gets noticed. Now, all the works they produced in their “lean” years waiting tables is actually worth something. Oh, the works were good all along, but being good at something doesn’t mean that anyone will pay you for the work. But now, finally, all that hard work and education has paid off.
An alternative scenario might be: Artsy person works a full-time job that they don’t like all that much, and on the side they do their artsy stuff. Now and then something they make sells and give them a little money. They never really “make it big”, but the modest flow of income that comes from their artsy work encourages them to keep trying.
These are far more common scenarios than the one you describe. Believe it or not, most of us artsy folk can’t afford to sit on our laurels, eating bon-bons and watching soaps while the royalties flow in. We work and struggle every damned day, and half the time the work we do won’t make a dime. But maybe it will someday, so we keep trying. Because we know that if we “make it big” someday, we will actually get to keep the fruits of our labors, no matter how many years it took.
Once in a blue moon, this does happen.
But more often, a little trickle of money will come into the kids. And in my case, if I were to kick off tomorrow, my loved ones would maybe be able to get some money from my work. And this seems only fair, since they helped support me through school, through the “lean years”. They deserve to be paid back for their faith in me.
I just told you. More often than not, they are waiting tables and hoping to pay off student loans. They are going to publishers and getting rejected. (And before you start with the, “Maybe they weren’t any good” mantra, I might remind you that many current bestsellers and “famous” artists struggled for many years and suffered much rejection before finally getting recognized. It’s very common.)
Give me a break. How often does this really happen? If your scenario were really common, folks like Steven Spielberg and Stephen King would have retired ages ago. So why do they keep on working?
No. If you are an unknown, no one will give a shit about you. Only until an artist becomes popular will the older work become known. And if you had your way, everyone else, not the artist, would be able cash in on the old work. All the work the artist did while they were waiting tables and working a sucky job to meet the bills—they’d get nothing for all that struggle and sweat.
But a lot of the “cool shit” will already be free for the taking.
And a lot of the great artists won’t be able to afford to keep working at their art, because there will be less of an incentive to do so. They’ll know that after a certain amount of years, their hard work won’t be theirs to sell anymore.
I think Dogface’s solution would help remedy this. And yes, it’s a problem. But I don’t see why so many “small fry” should be screwed over because Disney is greedy.
Bullshit. This is not the scenario of many artists, and you ought to know it.
Another thing (as I have brought up in previous threads):
My dad died over 10 years ago. He left thousands of beautiful Kodachrome slides, of beautiful scenery from all over the globe. If you had your way, all these slides would be “public domain” now, since he’s been dead for a while. Right? So why should I, the only person right now who has access to them and knows how to scan them digitally, release them to the public? I’d get nothing for my trouble. So his beautiful photography would be never shared with the world. Is this what you want?
And even if I could claim some rights over them for a while, how long should I have rights over them? They aren’t mine, after all. I just have access to them.
I would hope that the courts would see the difference between a CEO of a large media giant and a “small fry” operation (like me). But, you may have a point.
That’s not true. I benefit from copyright laws.
I have photos taken many years ago. And I have my dad’s photos. I can still make money from them. I like having that protection.
Bullshit. This “free publicity” thing is a myth a lot of the time. I’ve had that offer of “I can’t pay you for your work, but I can give you publicity” many times. I believed the line when I was 15, but soon learned that it rarely worked that way.
Does it work like that sometimes? Sure! But not all the time. I think the artist should be the one to decide if they want to give away their work for free, for “publicity”. They shouldn’t be forced into it. It often doesn’t work. I know first hand.
Bullshit. I don’t make that much money from my work right now, and you can bet that if someone could “steal” my work with more ease I’d make even less. People won’t pay me for something if they can get it for free.
Please… when has that happened? How do you explain the massive sales of Radiohead’s Kid A and Eminem’s The Eminem Show (I think that’s the one), which were leaked to the internet and downloaded by the masses for weeks before the official release? Eminem’s target demographic is exactly the group most likely to download music.
I don’t think copyrights should last longer than 15 years or so, because the idea is to give an incentive for more creative work, not to compensate for work already done.
Most freelance photographers don’t take photos and sell them for royalties - at least not as the main source of income. They usually work on contracts, taking photos for magazines and other publications.
IANACopyright Lawyer or historian of copyright, but there seem to be a few misunderstandings about the principles involved.
InquisitiveIdiot stated:
This is patently false. In the music world especially there are plenty of One Hit Wonders who are living comfortably off a single 20-, 30-, or 40-year-old song.
However yosemitebabe seems to believe that copyright is a God-given right, like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or an unlimited property right. This is not true either.
Simply put, copyright and patent laws are an exchange between the individual creator/inventor and society at large. We, the public, encourage creative people to improve our lives with their creations by enabling them to profit from their exclusive use for a limited period of time. In exchange for giving them this exclusivity, they agree that at the end of the copyright or patent term, the work enters the public domain and other people will be able to use/reproduce the work without paying royalties.
Note that this does not mean the creator has lost its use, only that others can now use it as well. In patent law this is especially important, since it permits other inventors to advance and improve on earlier inventions.
In the copyright arena, it simplifies and makes less expensive the creation of new works. For instance, a movie that uses a classical music score doesn’t have to get permission from Beethoven’s estate or pay a royalty for the composition. (Yes, they have to pay to use the specific recording, but you get the point.)
Another argument for limited copyright terms says that if a copyright holder no longer cares about a work and discards it, it could be lost to all future users. But if it is in the public domain, people with an interest in it will preserve it, something unlimited copyright terms would preclude.
As has become obvious, in the digital age this rationale is not as persuasive as it once was. Some people argue that with extended copyrights, companies like movie studios are encouraged to preserve negatives of old movies they used to throw out because of the profit potential that new technologies provide. Thus material that might have been lost is saved, which was part of the original intent of copyright limits. It is an argument that may have some merit.
But I think there is a much larger issue that the corporations are simply blind to. Public domain says something about the relationship between individuals and society. Namely, that although we all look out for our individual interests, we also have a responsibility to society. All artists, inventors, writers, and musicians benefited from earlier works that influenced them, and are therefore not the sole owners of the works they create. As creative works enter our culture, they become part of that culture, part of something larger that we all own and have a certain right to. Copyright and patent limits codify this relationship, while providing creators with a reasonable income from their works.
IMO, corporations are now asking for an unreasonable level of income, and are asserting an unlimited ownership right at the expense of society as a whole. This is something they should not be permitted to get away with.
Now, for a point that yosemitebabe raised. Those slides your late father took: IANAL, but as long as he never published them and you have clear title to them (no disputed wills, etc.), my understanding is that you can copyright them yourself today and enjoy copyright protection until you’ve been dead fifty years (or is it now 70?) Any images that he had previously copyrighted and/or published would now be heading for the public domain (depending on when he died), but if they’ve been sitting in the filing cabinets for fifty years, I think you can start the clock today. Check the Library of Congress’ Web site for more detail.
I could say more, but I have to get back to work (creating copyrighted material).
Yes, I am aware that this is how the law stands now. So I am happily scanning my dad’s slides. 
But if some on this thread got their way, and the copyright were reduced to 20 years, why would I have any right to these photos? The original photographer is dead. I’m just an heir. Several here have expressed irritation on the heirs enjoying the copyright of their parents/relatives. And that’s all I am. An heir.
You mean that artists, photographers, writers shouldn’t be “compensated” for work they do? That’s depressing. How many creative types will be eager to keep on working, knowing that they probably will never be fully compensated for their years of work?
And—15 years? 15 years and that’s it? Sure, some photographers get paid outright or upfront for their work, (just like a lot of artists do “work for hire”) but a lot of freelance photographers do enjoy income from old photos, just like a lot of creative types have to wait years for some of their work to turn a dime.
And this doesn’t even account a possible scenario of someone who wrote a book 15 years ago (for instance), self-published it, never got any attention for it, and now, 15 years later, a larger publisher with a big budget and big ad campaign budget can take the book, publish it, get the profits, while the original author gets nothing. (Not even the money back for self-publishing it the first time?)
Sometimes, it takes years to get “discovered”, and it takes years of struggling, working dead-end jobs to finally hit “pay dirt”. There aren’t all that many “overnight wonders” (though of course it does happen). There’s an ongoing joke about how the “overnight success” took 10 years to get there. People often are blissfully ignorant about how much time, effort and rejection it often takes before someone finally “makes it”.
It’s my understanding that the published/unpublished distinction disappeared with the 1976 Act. For works created before January 1, 1978, unpublished works were suddenly copyrighted. After that date, the normal term for a work created after January 1, 1978 applied to the work. Certainly, the person who owns the work can apply for copyright registration, but the duration of copyright is still measured by the author’s life.
Unfortunately, yosemitebabe, I have to agree with the short copyright people. If you release your work to the world, the natural state of that work is public domain, the law gives you a copyright so that you have an opportunity to profit before PD kicks in. It is nothing more than an encouragement to create art, it is not a guarantee, nor is it ‘protection’ for your work.
If you fail to profit from your work for 15-20-30 years, you have failed as a businessman, the world doesn’t owe you any more than you have been given. It’s time to let others use that work to create value for society, since you’ve been unable to.
In your book scenario, the author was totally unable to bring that work to public attention. Keep it under copyright and NOBODY will enjoy it because of the author’s bumbling attempt to self-publish. Put it in public domain, and a skilled publisher can present it to the world and allow all of us to enjoy it. Under today’s ridiculous copyright lengths, that novel will be undiscovered and unenjoyed by the public for a century, possibly forever, if it loses relevance after such a long time. How can that be considered the best option?
That pretty nicely summarizes Thomas Jefferson’s take on the reason for the “limited time” Constitutional provision applying to intellectual property. Ideas, whether practical or creative ideas, are naturally as subject to ownership as air is. But the granting of a brief term of monopoly to the creator exists to provide a reasonable incentive to induce the creator to create and share his/her works.
I’ve been ruminating over this hypothetical copyright law for awhile: the creator gets 20 years of exclusive rights, and another 20 of exclusive commercial rights, to his creations.
IOW, if you were to write and record a song and copyright it today, I could legally make a free copy for my personal use in 2023 under this scheme. But if someone wanted to play it on the radio, or as part of a movie soundtrack, or as music in the background on a TV program, etc., then they would have to pay royalties if they do so before 2043.
Addendum: if today’s laws had applied to Rudyard Kipling’s works, they would still be under copyright. Yep, the writings of the 19th-century “White Man’s Burden” poet would still be privately owned in the early years of the 21st century: Kipling lived until 1936.
As people live longer, such bizarre instances of long-term restriction will multiply. Works can be restricted for, foreseeably, 150 years after creation - you create a work at age 20, live to 100, and it goes into the public domain when you would have been 170, under today’s law.
I would just like to address a point that keeps coming up, and seems to be at the root of yosemitebabe’s disagreement. Incidentally, yosemitebabe, I’m tired of arguing with you. If you still refuse to see the merits of my position, I’m turning you over to everyone else here. If you do, the argument is over. Either way, I wash my hands of it.
To everyone else, I apologize in advance for any unnecessary emotional responses in the rest of my post.
Listen. Listen closely. I’m going to tell you something that apparently, you haven’t realized. It’s a very basic fact:
“public domain” DOES NOT EQUAL “give it away for free”
The ONLY thing implied by a work being in the “public domain” is that other people can buy your work FOR WHATEVER PRICE YOU HAPPEN TO SELL IT AT and make copies themselves and sell them for whatever they want. It does not, never has, and never should mean you give your work away for free. ALL it means is that your work is now subject to the laws of supply and demand. You only end up having to charge a fair price, or else someone will just sell your stuff cheaper than you do. Prices set by supply and demand provide the optimal balance between profit for you and goods for the consumer. You should have learned that in economics 101, a course you may have been required to take at your fancy art school. If you didn’t take it, you should. The point is that having works in the public domain does not mean you can’t make money off of them.
Owning the copyrights to something only gives you one thing: the absolutely exclusive rights to screw over the populace for a period of time. It was intended to give you a temporary monopoly over your art. Now, all it does is allow record companies to charge 16 for a freakin' cd that cost about .10 to make. If the last 150 years of economics has learnt anything, it’s that MONOPOLIES HURT EVERYONE. Copyright is NOT an unalienable right. It’s a temporary reward for doing a good work for society. If you don’t take advantage of it, tough shit, compete with everyone else who’s trying to make a buck any way they can. You can still make money off of your work, it’s just no longer a carte blanche to charge anything you damn well please. And for God’s sake, don’t whine about how you’re no longer getting an unfair advantage for stuff you did two decades ago. You’re not entitled to the money that you would have made had your work been popular then. Suck it up and make something better.
Whew. A bit more emotional than I had planned to be. Mods, don’t worry, I don’t want to turn this into a Pit thread, there’ll be no more outbursts from me. Everyone, continue.
Individual human beings are not the gross abusers of copyright. It is corporations that grossly abuse copyright. The root problem is the delusion that corporations have civil rights. INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE have civil rights. Thus, arguments about “protecting the artist” are ultimately secondary. Make copyright’s term as “Artist’s lifetime plus X years” and fix that Constitutionally. Prohibit corporations from actually owning copyright. Instead, they may purchase an exclusive for-complete-term-of-copyright licenses from a real copyright holder. In regard to new editions and derivative works, that can also be written into a purchase agreement.
Well, to be honest, I’m tired of it too. I’m tired of people assuming that if we don’t make money from our work, we must be crappy and we don’t “deserve” to make money later. Or that we all sit back waiting for the big royalty checks to come in. Or that we all want to hold our work hostage to the world, while holding out for fantastic sums of money that of course the world will be forced to pay because we are so irreplacable.
But the truth is, usually we just want to make a living, (or just a little side income) and the copyright laws help us do that.
[quote]
To everyone else, I apologize in advance for any unnecessary emotional responses in the rest of my post.
Here is the definition of “Public Domain”: “The realm embracing property rights that belong to the community at large. These property rights are unprotected by copyright or patent, and are subject to appropriation by anyone.”
OK, so technically, I can still “sell” my work. I can also “sell” this spool of thread I have, but exactly how many people are going to rush to me specifically to buy it? Spools of thread can be gotten anywhere. And while a spool of thread has great value (to a seamstress) there is no incentive for anyone to buy spools of thread from any particular party. Just like there is no incentive for buyers to buy artwork from the artist, when they can get it anywhere else, and in a lot of cases, even for free.
And that’s the thing—sell it. They can sell it, and they did not create it.
Of course I don’t know your background, but I have a vague feeling that if you’ve stepped foot in any art school, or been around many artists, you didn’t learn much from the experience. Because if you did, you’d be aware of the “publicity” myth, and you’d be aware that most artists can’t afford to charge outrageous sums for their work, they don’t sit on their asses collecting checks from their sole great masterpiece, and that just because an artist doesn’t pull in the big bucks straight out of school, it doesn’t meant that their work is bad. All these things I’d assume you’d know, if you spent any quality time at a “fancy art school”.
And I can still (technically) make money off of my spool of thread, too. Wow, the checks are flowing in now!
Well, we must agree to disagree. Because I always was taught that it was a way to prevent everyone else from screwing me over.
You know, this is the frustrating part. So many of you don’t understand that creative types often do everything they can to promote themselves, and their work is genuinely good. But no matter how hard to work to promote themselves, it can be a dog-eat-dog world, and recognition can take time.
I don’t know how some of the rest of you can be so confident that these kind of artists somehow botched their own self-promotion, and therefore don’t “deserve” to actually profit from their own work. (Because they “waited too long”.) Some artists or authors are before their time. Some styles of work are not in “fashion”, and all of a sudden are. ::shrug:: This is how it often goes with creative works, and I have to say that I am glad that the current copyright laws allow creative people to profit from works that take time to be recognized.
Oh, if only it were that easy. Very few artists can charge whatever they damned well please. There is still competition out there—if I charge too much for my Yosemite photos, (for instance) there are a jillion other Yosemite photographers who will have more reasonable prices. I have to compete with other creative folks who produce similar work.
Most of us, if we want to make any money, cannot afford to price our work too high. Perhaps a few “Big name” people try it, but all of us “small fry” sure as hell cannot.
“Unfair advantage”? See, that’s the thing. I don’t think it’s “unfair”, I think it’s about time that I get some money for some work I did a while ago. I didn’t get paid much then, but maybe I can get paid something now. Doesn’t sound “unfair” to me.
And if the stuff I did back then was lacking, why the hell would anyone else want it? Why can’t I keep my “unfair advantage” to something that apparently must not have any value, because it couldn’t make any money for 20 years?
See, you can’t have it both ways—if the older work sucked and that’s why I couldn’t sell it, then me keeping my “unfair advantage” on it means nothing. It sucked, no one wants it, no one will ever want it, no great loss to society.
But if it is good and I never managed to make any money off of it, and now all of a sudden there is some demand for it, all of a sudden I should not be able to make some money off of it? I made it, I invested my time in it, and now someone wants to buy it. I don’t see why every Tom, Dick and Harry is suddenly entitled to make money off of it too, simply because 20 years have passed. They contributed nothing to its creation. Only I did.
If this is the most “emotional” you’ve seen, you haven’t been around GD much! We can get much more heated than this! 
But how, oh how, did this “skilled publisher” find this undiscovered book? They had to find it first, right? And why can’t they simply contact the author, offer to pay this unknown and unrecognized author a fair amount of money for their book? No doubt, most of the time (almost all of the time) the author would jump at the chance to be published by a “skilled publisher”. I see no reason why the “skilled publisher” can’t afford to pay the author a fair price for this work that is obviously so good that it needs to be shared with the world.
So, I am gathering that my family, as my father’s heirs, can have rights to his photographs for 70 years after his death?
So, what say all of you about this hypothetical 20 year limit policy in regards to my dad’s photos? I am not the photographer, so giving me rights to his photographs will not “encourage” the photograher to make more photographs. (The photograher, my dad, is dead.) I am an heir, and I get the impression that some of you don’t like the idea of heirs getting royalties for work. So, what is your solution? Should I be able to have rights to my dad’s photos, should I be able to sell them? Or are they already in the public domain?
In closing, I have to say that think Dogface has pretty much gotten it right—I like his proposal very much. And I’d also like to say that I am glad that there are copyright laws protecting individuals. I also think RTF’s suggestion of a certain amount of exclusive rights and then a certain amount of commercial rights sound interesting. I’d still want to extend the years somewhat, but it’s an interesting idea…
Who knows how they found it, maybe in a dusty used book store. Point is, he HAD his chance to earn money off it, decades of opportunity, and failed to capitalize. Maybe he’s a bad businessman, and will foul up the deal with Skilled Publishing, too. I want artists to be able to earn money from their art, but at some point you’ve had enough time. Some point BEFORE a century passes.
It is possible to inherit copyrights, so this is right. (See 17 U.S.C. 201, “The ownership of a copyright may be transferred in whole or in part by any means of conveyance or by operation of law, and may be bequeathed by will or pass as personal property by the applicable laws of intestate succession.”) Copyrights are the sorts of things you can make provisions for in your will, or sell to someone else completely, if you like. Of course, to determine exactly who in your family owns the copyright would require delving into your father’s estate, which is better done off the internet.
Also, it’s 17 U.S.C. 408 that says the owner of the copyright can seek registration, so registration isn’t limited to the author.
But the marginal cost of producing additional copies is zero or fairly close to it. So the tendency will be to drive the price to zero, which is why if a work is in the public domain, people aren’t inclined to pay very much for the work itself. The “fair price” ends up having to be zero or fairly close to it. Why pay the author a dollar when you can download it for free? The author simply will not be able to make any money off of their work itself because the author cannot compete on price with free.
Copyright terms are always measured from the life of the author. So if dad made some slides, you are now into the 70 year period after his death. Also, the term varies for works made for hire, unpublished copyrightable works, and published works. The differences is about 20 years, more for the individual author and less for the corporation.
Copyrights are good. They promote creativity and yield monetary rewards if your works are deemed valuable in our capitalistic society. However copyrights that last so long that the only person who can say they know the author is a historian don’t promote anything. If intellectual property does not promote creativity, then intellectual property should go away. There is no other justification for it. I am not speaking out of my elbow either as I am an intellectual property lawyer and regularly deal with copyright issues, among others. Some copyright holders, in my experience, believe that copyrights somehow validate their works and give value to them. They don’t. If I hear from another member of the tin foil hat brigade complaining that someone has copied their latest manifesto, I’ll scream.
Downloaders (those that don’t pay) are stealing. No one person is stealing very much though so it does seem unfair to demand between $30000 and $100000 per instance of copying (i.e. each song) of college students, no matter how light fingered they are. Shoplifters don’t get those kind of punishments. The problem is that RIAA and companies like Disney are clearly gouging people, a pratice that is legal under our system as it stands. Add to that the idea that they will be able to gouge you for more than a century and outrage boils over.
The only solution is to create a system that allows for downloading with the payment of prorated fees while simultaneously shortening the copyright term to something that a reasonable individual would consider to be “limited”, which is the Constitutional requirement. As I said above, I believe that 50 years or the life of the author, whichever is longer, would likely suffice. Royalties for fifty years is nothing the sneeze at.
cj
I’d just like to add that corporations play by the same rules everyone else does, in terms of copyright. It’s not owner’s lifetime that the copyright lasts, it’s the artist’s lifetime. That’s why Disney is pushing for longer and longer extensions: cuz Walt kicked the bucket almost 50 years ago.
And as much as I despise the price gouging large corporations can do with copyrights, I feel it would be grossly impractical to have large differences between copyrights owned by individual artists and those owned by corporations. That is, there would be so many ways of getting around it the law would very quickly be bogged down with details. Besides, if you “starving artists” can bitch and moan about how you can’t make a living without 150 year long copyrights, why can’t they?
Not exactly. The duration of copyright is determined by how the work is created. See 17 U.S.C. 302. Walt’s work will be measured by his life, the works made for hire by the company Disney have different rules for duration.