10 Reasons Why Disney's Fox Takeover Is Terrifying
9. Their New IPs Will Never Be Available Again
As a point of clarification: that anyone should be obligated to put their intellectual property up for sale, or that we should enter into some kind of free-for-all where everything is in the public domain, are both equally ridiculous ideas. That being said, Disney’s approach to copyright ownership does create a problem with the Fox deal.
Normally, there is a lot of give and take to business, especially where intellectual property rights are concerned since IPs are constantly changing hands as businesses grow, shrink, and change direction. The exception is where Disney is concerned, as it’s basically the corporate equivalent of Smaug from The Hobbit. Something else that Disney will probably get their mitts on eventually.
Unlike the companies it has bought most recently, Disney is not owned by a George Lucas or a Rupert Murdoch. It has a series of chairmen who have finite contracts, and can be ousted by the shareholders if their decisions hurt the company, which means that there will never be a time when Disney decides to call it a day and sell up.
And short of a series of catastrophic financial mistakes, or selling parts of the company to comply with anti-trust law, Disney will never be in position where they need to start selling this huge back catalogue of content they have just acquired. So these IPs won’t be changing hands until the copyright expires, which, for some franchises, is well over a hundred years from now.