I see I was beaten to it on the Disney side.
However, the short story i was remembering is Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson. I have it in the collection By Any Other Name.
The protagonist (trying to persuade a senator to vote against a copyright extension) claims the human race is heading for psychic trauma.
She points out art is around 15,600 years old (Lascaux cave paintings).
The painters sang and danced too but there was no way of recording that.
Musical notation eventually arrived.
Dancers even more recently learned to leave a record.
Racial memory has been getting longer. Biggest improvement was invention of writing.
But that took a lot of effort - diff to hand-copy manuscripts faster than barbarians, plagues etc could destroy them.
Printing press ensures *some* survive
But now art was marketable. Money in it. Writers decided they should own right to copy their work.
"Then in last 150 years largest quantum jump in human racial memory. Recording tech. Visual: photography, film, video, Xerox, holo. Audio: low-fi, hi-fi, stereo and digital. Then computers..."
New art forms and new ways of preserving ancient art forms.
Each required reassessment of the idea of copyright. System now is 50 years after death. [I said it was an old story!]
But size of humam race has increased dramatically since 1900s and so has average human life span.
Lecture on Infinity.
Reminder of George Harrison My Sweet Lord case [hey! That's in my referencing and plagiarism lecture!!] and others similar - artists reusing/stealing ideas.
88 notes. 176 if your ear is good enough for quarter notes. Rests. Time sigs. Huge number of possibilities. But not infinite.
Lots of arrangements not 'music', lots effectively identical to each other.
16 billion people on earth, some composers, but bringing out fewer new pieces, at longer intervals.
"2 out of every 5 copyright submissions... rejected on first computer search"
Individual productivity is declinimg
Most popular composer alive: 12 of continuous music. Wagner - 60 hours. Beatles - 12 hours in less than ten years.
SF examples of Van Vogt (Alien) and Ben Bova/Harlan Ellison (suing TV studio for stealing series idea). [Bet this was the Gen Ship thing I put in my bib]. "All 3 collected"
"That ended legal principal that one does not copyright *ideas* but *arrangements of words*. The number of word-arrangements is finite, but the number of *ideas* is *much* smaller."
There's more good stuff but I'm tired and this is tedious on a phone.
But "meanwhile a small grouo of writers, desperate for something more to write about, for a new story to tell, invented a new genre called science fiction. They mined the future for ideas.... in less than a century they had mined it out; there hasn't been a genuinely original idea in sf in over fifty years."
Stuff about new art forms and limits of senses.
We need selective voluntary amnesia (not extended copyright).
Well, it is just a story and its clear what side of the debate Spider R was on!
Fun read!
tc