There are a lot of things wrong with this argument. Empowering creators is one thing, but depriving them of the freedom to use their properties as they see fit (and profit from them accordingly) doesn't do that.
A list of principles like this isn't in anyone's interest, unless you add one very important fifth principle: copyright ends at death.
So Tim O'Neill says ideas belong to creators. Okay, fine. I can sympathize with this, because the idea of 'selling' IP is dubious to begin with. An idea is still yours even if you give other people the rights to use and profit from it; all you've given up is the publishing or marketing rights. That's not a fact that advocates of creator's rights want to challenge; they just want a system where people can give over the rights to publish and profit from their work while receiving proper credit and being compensated fairly. That's fine. That's great. That's something to aspire for.
But if you're arguing that only the creator can own his or her ideas, and that that creator's ownership is the only one that matters, then you can't also argue that full transfer of ownership is wrong ' because that's what happens when a creator's estate inherits their work. By these criteria, the Siegel and Schuster families have no rights to Superman of any kind because the men who created the character are dead. Whether an IP is owned by a family business or a corporate business is immaterial; it's ownership by people other than the creator, and by Tim's argument, that's wrong.
But if copyright ends at death ' not 50 years later, not 70 years later, but immediately ' then maybe we might be onto something. Let's say that the copyright for all of Jack Kirby's characters had expired in 1994, and they entered the public domain. Marvel could still publish all their books as usual, but in this scenario, everyone else could do Fantastic Four and Avengers books too ' including the Kirby family, who could commission somebody to do their own Avengers title at, say, Image. This would allow them to recoup money from those characters that rightfully should have been Jack's when he was alive and working for Marvel.
Before you all scoff at the idea of instant public domain, consider this: Dave Sim is already doing it. He's made legal arrangements so that, when he and Gerhard are dead, Cerebus becomes public domain. There are a lot of things I can't respect about Dave Sim, or about Cerebus, but I can respect this: It's Sim's baby, and as far as he's concerned, once he's gone, none of us are qualified to speak for his characters ' which means we're all equally unqualified. That's what the public domain is all about.
I agree with Tim that the American intellectual-property regime is FUBAR, but let's first acknowledge why. It's because corporate giants like Disney ' a company whose IP has been built on public-domain fairy-tale stories ' have lobbied for draconian legislation to extend copyright protection over and over again. It's because trademark law is being used to do end-runs on the public domain, as ERB Inc. is trying to do with Dynamite's John Carter books. Corporations have the money and the lawyers to screw over creators because they own the properties, but the problem isn't corporate ownership: It's ownership, period. A robust public domain empowers both creators and consumers, because it allows for a free exchange of ideas and a better cultural conversation. And I think that if consumers had the choice to support Marvel's Avengers or the Jack Kirby Family's Avengers, fans of the characters could get their Avengers fix without having to make such convoluted moral compromises with themselves.
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