One of the easiest ways to demonstrate how eminently reasonable a 28-year copyright duration – the United States’ original copyright length – is to look at what would and would not be public domain if we switched to a 28-year copyright right now. Ordinarily, a sudden legal shift like this would be devastating. Even if the new law is completely reasonable and better than the current system, pulling the rug out of people who made plans around current laws would be disastrous for people whose only crime was failing to anticipate the laws being changed immediately, with no grace period to change course. But a 28-year copyright doesn’t actually do that! We could seriously just declare that all copyrights last only 28 years, that all copyrights older than 28 years have expired as of right now, and it would be fine.
Let me demonstrate.
Genshin Impact
Genshin Impact is a phenomenally successful and quite recent intellectual property, first released in 2020. That means it will remain under copyright for full 28 years, going public domain in its 29th year of release, 2049. That is a fucking sci-fi year. Genshin Impact is not remotely at risk of being devoured by copycats stealing their thunder at the height of their popularity, because the height of their popularity is not going to be 29 years after they’re released. Things sometimes take a couple of years to rev up, but not three decades, come on.
Star Wars
Even under a 28-year copyright scheme, the entire Prequel Trilogy is still under copyright. While Star Wars fans and competing studios would be free to make new stories in the Original Trilogy and the first phase of the expanded universe, Disney’s control over the prequel era means that competitors either have to look to Disney’s canon and make their new stories compatible with it or else accept the daunting task of taking the OT and maybe some of the 90s books as the only canon and attempting to compete with Disney’s canon. On the one hand, Disney’s canon isn’t very popular. On the other hand, you’d have to try and convince people to accept the de-canonization of the Clone Wars and the Knights of the Old Republic. You can pick up Princess Leia’s reference to the Clone Wars in A New Hope and tell an entirely new version of that story and that would be cool and all, but it would have to be entirely new, which means it would decanonize the Clone Wars TV show, which means a lot of Star Wars fans will not follow you there. It’s technically possible to fight Disney for the Clone Wars era, but even under a 28-year copyright scheme, you’ll lose. They control the foundational IP for too many beloved stories in that era.
But there’s a time limit on that. In 2024, you can’t use battle droids, the planet of Naboo, or the vast majority of details of the Jedi Order before Order 66. Disney has the copyright on all of those, and anyone who wants prequel stories has to get them from Disney. But in 2028, the copyright on the Phantom Menace would expire, and by 2033, the copyright on Revenge of the Sith would be up. Now it would be possible for competing studios to make prequel-era content compatible with the prequel canon that people love, even if specific episodes and new ideas introduced by the Clone Wars would remain under copyright for a while. You wouldn’t be able to make stories about Ahsoka Tano until 2037, but you could make stories about clones fighting battle droids as early as 2031, and it would be easy to make them compatible with Ahsoka Tano’s existing stories even if you can’t directly reference or recreate them. Disney isn’t doing anything particularly exciting with the character of Ahsoka Tano these days either, so by 2031 (when Attack of the Clones would go public domain) you have all the clone troopers, battle droids, and Mace Windus you need to tell new stories in the era that don’t contradict anything fans already love. At that point, as long as you can produce better movies and TV shows than Disney, you can fight them for control of the Star Wars canon and win.
This puts Disney on the clock: They can either start making good, new Star Wars content in the few remaining years while they still have control of critical IP, or if they can’t, then it’s an open call to any studio who thinks they can make good Star Wars movies to release enough bangers that they seize the crown of “the Star Wars guys” in the eyes of the public.
Marvel/DC
If the public domain had been radically expanded in 2005, Marvel still would’ve been able to build the first three phases of the MCU because no one else was able to build a decade-spanning franchise like they were. If it had been radically expanded in 2015 (around when Age of Ultron came out – easily the weakest Avengers movie, but not bad enough to derail the MCU) no one would’ve been able to wrest the title of “the Marvel guys” away from them, both because of their affiliation with original creators like Stan Lee and because they were making good movies. If it had been radically expanded in 2020, then yeah, Marvel Studios would probably have lost their crown as “the Marvel guys” by now, because nobody liked Phase Four and four years is enough time for competitors to get some films out. Or maybe superhero fatigue is real and nobody can produce popular superhero movies anymore because the genre is too tired. Whatever.
The point is that regardless of the state of copyright law at any point from 2005 onwards, it is unlikely that anyone would’ve been able to stop the MCU from happening up until the point when it turned mediocre. Drastically curtailing copyright lengths wouldn’t have stolen those characters from Marvel Studios, just given them to anyone else who thinks they can do better.
And on the other end we have DC. DC’s cinematic universe is a continuous trainwreck. There have been several individually good movies, but they have way too many bad ones for anyone to ever feel good about the whole. Batman and Superman would’ve been an absolute feeding frenzy, and the worst thing that could’ve happened is that more bad movies about these characters would’ve come out, which wouldn’t have made things any worse (you’re under no obligation to see them), or else someone else makes the Justice League work and now the number of good movies goes up.
Every superhero anyone cares about is already past a 28-year copyright deadline, but that would not have stopped any of the superhero movies that were any good from being made. Or if it did, it would’ve been because they were outcompeted by other, even better movies. But the reason nobody made Iron Man movies except Marvel Studios in 2008 isn’t because no one had the copyright. Studios who wanted the copyright to Spider-Man, X-Men, and Daredevil had gotten their hands on it and, either immediately or eventually, squandered it. The reason why nobody but Marvel Studios made Iron Man is because nobody but Marvel Studios believed in Iron Man’s potential as a movie.
The Legend of Zelda
This one I bring up because nothing would change. Yeah, you’d be legally allowed to release a game called Zelda and try to compete with Tears of the Kingdom. Good fucking luck.
Pokemon
The copyright on the original 151 Pokemon and the Kanto region would expire in 2026 under a 28 year copyright term, and if anything that just proves that 28 years might be too long. People are trying to make Pokemon knock-offs left and right, and while Game Freak isn’t exactly doing an amazing job with the franchise, the wall that people keep running into is that 150 is a big number. Games that try to take the concept in an interesting direction run into the problem that it ceases to be recognizable, while games that stick to the Gen 3-5 formula risk succeeding and being knock-offs. What this franchise desperately, desperately needs is to give fans access to some of the earlier generations of monsters so that someone can take the concept in a new direction while still having Bulbasaur and Pikachu in it. A lot of media works by taking something familiar and putting a new twist on it and the Pokemon fan-game sub-genre is being absolutely strangled by the inability to use the actual Pokemon as the familiar thing, leaving us with games that have to make everything else familiar and use a new set of ~100 monsters as the “twist.”
Nintendo won’t want to give up on this cash cow because it’s made them $50,000,000,000, but also it has already made them $50,000,000,000. What kind of idiot would try to argue that anyone will be dissuaded from making new stories and intellectual property because Pokemon was only able to make $50,000,000,000 before going public domain? Particularly when Nintendo will still have copyright over every other generation, which will either encourage them to give those generations a bit more love rather than recycling Gen 1 over and over and over again or else see the entire franchise slip through their fingers one generation at a time until the games people actually like are all in the public domain and they’ve got nothing left but the likes of Sword and Shield.
And in order to avoid cluttering up the list with a half-dozen similar examples, here’s a bunch of other intellectual properties that could be producing lots of fun new interpretations but which aren’t, because it’s just not practical for the majority of creators to sell an audience on two different new concepts for one project, which means by the time you’ve finished selling them on the idea that your version of [thing] is interchangeable with the original, you have exhausted their patience for new ideas and have no room left for the new twist you’re putting on [thing]:
-Gundam
-Warhammer 40k
-Godzilla (and King Kong, but Kong is public domain in the reasonably attainable year of 2029)
-Judge Dredd
-Tomb Raider (past the 28-year mark in 2025)
-The Elder Scrolls
-Diablo (past the 28-year mark in 2026)
-Fallout (past the 28-year mark in 2026)
-Half-Life(!) (past the 28-year mark in 2027, although Half-Life 2 isn’t until 2033 – Valve’s been cool about people selling Half-Life spin-offs on Steam, so copyright law probably isn’t standing in the way of a third-party Half-Life 3, but this just goes to show that you can let people pick up your famous-but-abandoned properties and it’s fine)
-Jason, Freddie, and an assortment of other slashers
-WarCraft (although you would want a lot of the lore from WarCraft III, not past the 28-year mark until 2031)
In all these cases, I think the most fertile ground for new stories comes from relatively low-budget indie productions who wouldn’t be able to afford a license even for a mostly-abandoned property, or else they’re being squandered by their current owners, or sometimes a combination of the two. Warhammer 40k already gives out licenses with such hit-and-miss quality that whether or not a specific 40k game or book is any good is a crapshoot, why not open the floodgates completely? Let some indies take a stab at making a better Godzilla video game, or at making a Judge Dredd TV show or game. Maybe the threat of someone else making Elder Scrolls VI will convince Bethesda to stop fucking around with Skyrim rereleases. The Diablo series is a trainwreck that would benefit from going back at least to III, probably II, regardless of copyright law, and the sucking maw of evil that is Activision-Blizzard isn’t going to rescue the series.
Harry Potter
Under a 28-year copyright term, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone would go public domain in 2026. A lot of the iconic imagery comes from the films, which would start going public domain in 2029. Most of what people actually care about from Harry Potter would be public domain with the first film, although there’s a few elements like the Marauder’s Map and the Deathly Hallows (the symbol, at least) that would take longer. But for the most part, a more sane copyright duration would break JK Rowling’s grip over the setting within just a few years.
This is also an example of how 28 years is way more than enough time to prevent original works from getting eaten alive by cheap imitators. The time when Harry Potter fanfic frenzy peaked was like twenty years ago and a 28-year copyright term would still only be almost expired on the first book.
Dragon Ball
Dragon Ball Z premiered in the United States in 1996 and DBZ Abridged started releasing in 2008, so although 1984’s Dragon Ball manga would’ve been completely public domain as early as 2013 (still five years ahead of the 2008 release of their first episode, though), the footage they used for the first ten episodes (not counting any brief cuts from things like the Bardock special) wouldn’t be public domain until 2023. It would barely now be legal to make an abridged cut of the anime and sell it.
I use this example to demonstrate that it’s not like a 28-year copyright duration would be some kind of anarchy where anything goes. Even artistically valuable projects that help newer voice actors and directors develop their talents to a professional level and thus clearly serve the public good wouldn’t have been strictly legal under a 28-year copyright term. It is, if anything, still too long.
I don’t want to give it a separate section, but Sonic the Hedgehog is a similar story playing out right now. I’m sure whoever’s making the movies would be desperate to avoid facing competition because they are okay at best, but the world would be a better place if that Jehtt guy on YouTube could start building hype and a team for Sonic Adventure 3, officially Kickstarting in 2028, the first year Shadow the Hedgehog would be in the public domain.
Frozen
One of the biggest losers of a 28-year copyright duration would, of course, be Disney, who would lose half of their iconic Disney princesses immediately. Elsa and Anna wouldn’t go public domain until 2042, though, so they’ve got mountains of time to figure out another money printer before losing that one. Competitors can use Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, and Jasmine, including their iconic Disney appearances (even ripping screens straight out of the films, which would be in the public domain), but not yet Mulan or Rapunzel. They also wouldn’t be allowed to call their toys, TV shows, etc. etc. Disney princesses, because the name Disney would still be covered under trademark law. You can use Steamboat Willie in your own media now in the Alpha Timeline where he’s gone public domain, but you’re still not allowed to trick people into thinking it was made by or in affiliation with the Disney Company.
Competitors can sell Belle and Ariel, but if your kid’s favorite princess is Moana, you’re still stuck with Disney. While Disney would undoubtedly lose some sales, even enough that I’m sure they would hate a 28-year copyright term, they’ve actually been pretty cool about shows like Once Upon A Time and the birthday princess industry. Despite having positioned themselves as the ultimate Final Boss of copyright law, even the drastic “change the copyright duration to 28 years and apply the new law to all works regardless of the law under original date of publication and put it into effect immediately and without warning” hypothetical doesn’t actually damage them that much.
Final Fantasy
For starters, the name “Final Fantasy” should probably be trademarked, because it doesn’t describe a specific setting or characters, but rather the work of a specific company in a certain genre. The only thing that unites the Final Fantasy series is that they are JRPGs made by Square-Enix (not even every JRPG made by Square-Enix, but whatever). But the first six games in the series would still be public domain, so anyone could host them for free download (or sell copies of them, but if free archives haven’t completely dropped the ball, it should be easy to find a free download of famous media in the public domain), and you could make sequels and spin-offs and remakes of those, specifically. So the Fabula Ultima guys could release official stats for the characters, settings, and monsters of Final Fantasies I-VI, for example, they just couldn’t call themselves Final Fantasy while doing it, and once the Final Fantasies with more famous setting names hit public domain, you could start using names like Midgar City Stories, Squall in the Garden, or Spira Chronicles. Those names won’t grab people as hard without the Final Fantasy prefix, and if that leads companies to try and build an identity around abstract titles rather than specific IPs then that would be great please do that.
Final Fantasy VII wouldn’t go public domain until 2026, which means that Square’s remake series would be well into its run before anyone else would be allowed to release a competitor, and it’s well-received enough that such a competitor would have to absolutely blow Square’s version out of the water to make it a favorable comparison. People are already going to be predisposed to think of the former IP holder as the “legitimate” continuation of the series, and they have to seriously fumble the setting to lose that. And Final Fantasy VII was famously a game that people clamored for a remake of for years before finally getting one even under existing copyright law where there was no threat of someone else picking it up and walking away with it in 2026.
This is another demonstration of just how long 28 years is, and how easy it would be for any reasonably competent company to retain de facto control over an IP even after its original installments are in the public domain. So long as they manage to take the story in an interesting direction in any of the 28 years since original publication, those follow-ups mean people will look to them as the “real” owner of the setting and view others as cheap knock-offs or, at best, a B-team making compatible material. And if they go 28 years without making anything good enough to stop a competitor from riding into the setting and making a follow-up that captures the public’s good will, then maybe they should suck less.