I remember a few years back reading a couple of articles, with actual photos, where cave art had been discovered that dated back to antiquity, that looks very much like a certain copyrighted/trademarked mouse owned by Disney. Unfortunately I cannot find any examples still present on the Internet – I suspect they were all taken down by content matching algorithms that can’t tell the difference between ancient cave art and said copyrighted/trademarked mouse.

Even stranger, in the early cartoons said mouse owned a dog that was named after what was then considered a planet. When we finally got a spacecraft out into space and got some high resolution photos of that (former) planet, there is something in those photos that looks a lot like the head of a cartoon dog on the surface of the planet. Not exactly the same dog, but then again since it’s probably a random land mass or something it’s a bit amazing that it bears a lot of resemblance to a cartoon dog, and maybe some resemblance to that cartoon dog.

But then again, there are rumors that Walt Disney was into some really esoteric and mystical stuff and had some contacts in high places. So it would not surprise me if he was stealing ideas from the "stream of consciousness" or whatever you want to call it. This has always been one of my objections to so-called "intellectual property" laws; they tend to presuppose that it takes a lot of work and effort to come up with that "thing" that should be protected, when quite often such ideas occur to people in dreams or in the shower (or maybe via tips from "friends in high places"). There were three or four different people who all came up with the idea for the telephone at the same time, but Bell was the first to patent it and because of that we got the monstrosity that became the Bell System and AT&T (one has to wonder how different things would have been if Antonio Meucci or Elisha Gray had been first to get a patent, since Bell pretty much ripped off both of them).

But really it is the whole "work once, get paid forever" thing that bothers me. If you are really good at construction and help build a bridge that lasts 200 years, you get a paycheck (hopefully), and only for the weeks you actually work. Come up with something that can be copyrighted, trademarked, or patented, and even if it only took you ten minutes in the shower to come up with the idea and another few hours to commit it to paper, you (or some copyright troll that you sell the idea to) can potentially get paid "forever" (a period longer than your lifetime, so for you it’s "forever"). That just never seemed right to me, and I really believe that "intellectual property" laws do far more harm than good. But they do benefit the rich (mostly), because even if a poor person has a great idea, the process to get it patented is far too costly and difficult for anyone that’s having trouble putting food on the table. It’s been a dysfunctional system from the very start. I can see a little benefit in trademarks (so not just any old greasy spoon seller of hamburgers can call themselves McDonald’s or Burger King) but I think copyrights and patents have done more to retard the advancement of civilization than to help it. They were bad ideas that got exported to the world, even to the "communist" nations that you’d think would be adamantly opposed to that kind of protectionism.