"The Little Mermaid"

"The Little Mermaid"

"As a fairy tale, it's warning is "Don't decide to sacrifice the
familiar for the exciting before you know for sure you can live the
life you dream. You may ruin your chances at happiness in both places
if you fail," which is good advice for a fairy tale to give. Disney's
version is more along the lines of "Whatever trouble you get into,
Daddy will make it O.K.," which is the kind of advice we have had far
too much of, In My Curmugeonly Opinion."

Sure. But what Disney did to "The Little Mermaid" is small beer compared with what Disney did to, e.g., "The Jungle Book".

"What worries me is that Disney may gain the power to prevent anyone
from telling the tale as it was meant to be told, forever destroying a
bit of the wisdom that makes us human, much as a software company,
through a patent, destroys a bit of the common good by robbing the
commons of it's commodity."

IMHO Disney _has_ created new intellectual property in its adaptation of traditional & copyright-expired tales; Disney's version is obviously tuned to their market, and (so long as we see that as consisting of small children) I don't see that there's much wrong with that. They should have picked a different title, though.

The media barons' attitude that, by altering an existing piece of IP, they automatically own the work(s) from which it was derived is obviously crazy. If they get that passed, all I have to do is to make a work loosely derived from Disney's version of "The Little Mermaid" & all the related Disney-branded products instantly become illegal. Result: lawyers become _much_ richer, I probably spend some time in the slammer & the business model of every company trading in intellectual property is completely demolished.