If I take a picture of a Mickey Mouse(TM) figurine - I own the copyright to the photo. Disney will retain copyright to their model, but that doesn't mean they own the result of my work, even if its derivative.
Yes, but that's an orthogonal argument to what this whole thread was about. Whether Meta has copyright on a render of a scene created by a different company.
Interestingly enough, the copyright on the 1928 movie “Steamboat Willie” – the short film that introduced the world to Mickey Mouse – will expire in 2024. That means the Steamboat-Willie-version of Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain.
As I understand it, that’s why they’ve been using the little Steamboat Willie clip at the beginning of films for the last several years—to make it a trademark, which never expires while in use.
The general consensus is that the current Congress is much less amenable to that lobbying than Congress was back in 1998, the last time US copyright terms were extended – and that Disney realises that, so they aren't seriously pursuing it this time around.
One reason is that supporters of the public domain are much better organised than in the 1990s, and their cause has become a lot more popular and mainstream. For example, Wikipedia is a household name with a lot of money (the Wikimedia Foundation has over US$200 million of cash and investments), and they would lobby and campaign hard against any such a proposal if it was being seriously pursued.
In the 1990s, you had the film, television, publishing and music industries all supporting copyright term extension, and no serious corporate opposition to it – I doubt most big tech companies would support copyright term extension, because they get no benefit from it (all of their own copyrighted works are much more recent), whereas public domain works are actually a resource they can use for their own purposes (zero copyright risk AI input)
Also: Disney was already unpopular with social conservatives in the 1990s, but they've arguably grown even more anti-Disney in the years since, plus the post-Trump GOP finds itself far beholden to its base than the 1990s GOP did – nobody in the contemporary GOP wants to vote for anything viewed as doing Disney's bidding, because they probably won't be forgiven. In the 1990s, they could be confident they would be.
I hope that you're right. Even the current copyright duration is absolutely insane, and the world is losing trillions USD in progress/knowledge/opportunity just so Disney can sell Mickey f@¢#ing Mouse! Enough already!
I'm willing to give the 1998 legislators the benefit of doubt -- they were probably clueless when it comes to internet and technology. But extending copyright further now should be seen as a crime against humanity.
Steamboat Willie itself might enter the public domain, but good luck trying to use the specific rendition of Mickey Mouse. Disney's been using that rendition on stuff like t-shirts recently to effectively renew their IP rights, probably because the larger copyright is ending soon.
