You want a perfect example of how a large body of public domain works encourages creativity? Well, look no further than Disney. Most of those classic Disney tales were, in fact, reworked versions of the creations of other people that were in the public domain. Snow White (Brothers Grimm), Pinocchio (Carlo Collodi), Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling), The Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Andersen), Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo), the list goes on.
“You want a perfect example of how a large body of public domain works encourages creativity? Well, look no further than Disney. “
And paradoxically, Disney has managed to exempt themselves from the very public domain laws by which they’ve amassed great wealth — they shamelessly gamed Congress into extending their Mickey Mouse copyright forever.
(And no, it won’t expire in a hundred years. We’ll all be dead, and the Disney lawyers will get another extension.)