They didn’t buy it. They licensed it, and these are the terms of copyright - which is what they used to license it.

If you rent a house, and your lease expires, that’s not the landlord stealing the house back from you.

> What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back.

If you can't make a profit off of a licensed property after 35 years of exclusive control, you've done something horribly wrong. If you sit on a licensed property and do nothing with it for decades, it should be allowed to revert to someone else, or better yet go into public domain.

Is that what is happening? My understanding of Termination of Transfer is that it keeps you from being able to make a sequel to your video game using the characters you licensed from me, but that the game you have already created you can continue to sell.

What the termination allows me to do as the creator of that character in this analogy is say - charcircuit isn't doing anything with my character for 35 years - I'm going to take back control and maybe do something myself with it or license it to someone else to do something with...

this happens with eg licensed music or product tie-ins or whatever, and the game just stops being sold

Copyright was originally intended to last 14 years, after which the work is transferred to public domain. That was back in the 1700s, when the pace of life moved much faster than it does now.

If it weren't for Disney's success at regulatory capture, the copyright would be expired and anybody would be able to produce a fictional work featuring Roger Rabbit, including Disney.

Not sure if sarcasm. If not:

Is 35 years not long enough? Disney knew the terms going in.

I think it should go back to the 25-year automatic ownership back to the actual creator.

> What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back.

Well in the case of the very thing we're talking about, the point was apparently to make $330 million in a single year in the 1980s

I honestly can't tell if this is meant sarcastic or not. The power offset is so huge you need clauses like this to keep the power at some form of equilibrium.

Oh noooo it isn't fair to Disney!

Oh, wait, I actually don't care about that at all.

The power dynamic is very asymmetrical. Disney is ABSOLUTELY free to negotiate with him to continue distributing the movie, running the ride, etc.

It has been 35 YEARS and Disney's failed to do anything else with the IP. The original creator wants to make a sequel, and now he's able to.

Also: you mentioned a scenario where you might make a video game and wanted to be able to distribute it in perpetuity. Unless you based the video game on some pre-existing creative work that someone else came up with (Roger Rabbit's Raucous Riot or something), you WILL retain the rights. Termination of copyright doesn't apply to works made for hire [0] (i.e., if you pay your employees to create the IP, it doesn't apply).

TLDR; fuck the mouse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976#Terminat...