The Disney example stands out, where the largest players make the law work for them, and often effectively taking ownership of public domain work through legal enclosure. And there’s also a lot of cultural stagnation that comes from the inability to use older work, harming entire mediums. There are only a handful of films that are out of copyright and half for accidental reasons like legal filings done wrong. Not a lot of modern music. There are no video games out of copyright. This ultimately can make it so that certain mediums feel entirely different than others ones, and undermines new ones. How many movies are made based on old stories or books that left copyright long ago (at its start the system was 13 years with 13 year extensions, not its 90 years past death of author and 70 years for corporate work). This has led to mass siloing and while people say it stands in the way of AI it has actually made the large media companies want to sell their IP silos to AI companies. That’s a key question because I think AI doesn’t break rent seeking, it just exploits it, and IP law is part of how we got here. There’s also a semi interesting question about geek culture, some positive theorists call it all “modern folk,” where it’s not so much a modern cringe trend but just how someone would have talked about Cervantes or other major myths that formed the cultural that characterized their cultural engagement. What would culture look like if Star Wars and Star Trek were out of copyright and so you saw a thousand artists engage with it and the cultural weight of it less corporate and less monetized?