by Chris McGinty
Nathan, in spite of his post yesterday (more on that later), is a big fan of Disney. He goes to Disney World somewhere between 0 and 153 times a year (yes kids, statistics are easy to manipulate). Speaking of manipulating (those of you who skip anything in parentheses have no idea what I’m talking about), a number of years ago Mickey Mouse him-mouserfucking-self (sorry I’m being so harsh, but fuck Disney) was supposed to go into the public domain. Those of us who hated Disney (as a corporation) long before YouTube made it popular to hate Disney (as a corporation) were more or less like, “Oh, that’s cool that Mickey Mouse will be in the public domain and people can write stories and other such stuff celebrating the character. That’ll be fun.” Then Disney (as a corporation) was all like, “Nah, fuck the guy who created Mickey Mouse and fuck his legacy passing into the public domain as a shared character for all to celebrate. We still got some moneyfucking profit to rake in so we can buy out Star Wars and fuck that the fuck up.” How did they manage this? They went to congress and said, “Hey you guys like keeping businesses on the verge of turning into a monopoly at any moment unless they disagree with you politically, right? Give us some more money by not letting Mickey Mouse pass into the public domain. Why? Well, because if Mickey Mouse is in the public domain, then anyone can take a beloved legacy character and reimagine him in ways that the audience doesn’t like by making him act in ways that the character would never act, and we can’t have that.” And congress was all like, “By decree of President Camacho (I don’t know… was the movie company that made “Idiocracy” owned by Disney?) it will be so that Disney will get to squeeze the cheese from this rodent for many more years to come.” Many people have argued that this further extension of copyright was a bad idea (citation needed) and I, for one, agree (provided those people I mentioned exist). I’m really not sure at what point it happened, but there has been a major move toward copyright being something that makes corporations rich and the artists have to go on strikes because their corporate overlords are making billions and the artists can’t compete with the independent artists on YouTube, because their contracts have stipulations that they might get royalties, but often don’t own the rights to their own creations. I think Walt Disney (the artist) was a creative and talented (and hopefully not anti-Semitic) creator. I think Disney (as a corporation) needs to quit being absolute mouseholes about everything.
Chris McGinty (definitely pictured here, because this particular image of him is now in the public domain) is a blogger whose big three political concerns are consumer protection, the national debt, and The First Amendment, including revision of copyright laws to protect artists from predatory corporations. Fuck Disney.