The most recognizable character in American popular culture today isn’t a politician, an athlete, or even a movie star. It’s a digitally rendered green infant from a franchise that debuted nearly five decades ago.
Grogu — better known to most people as Baby Yoda — is everywhere. He appears on lunchboxes, T-shirts, plush toys, and magazine covers. He is undeniably charming and perhaps the heart of the Star Wars franchise today.
His success also reveals something strange about contemporary culture. In the most technologically creative era in human history, many of our most important cultural touchstones remain tethered to stories created decades ago. Hollywood’s biggest bets are sequels, reboots, cinematic universes, and endlessly recycled content. There is remarkably little drive to create something new.
Most explanations for this cultural malaise focus on obvious culprits: risk-averse studio executives, engagement-optimizing algorithms, fragmented attention spans, and the economics of streaming. Each captures part of the story.
But these are symptoms, not causes. Beneath them lies a deeper structural constraint on cultural renewal.
Today’s cultural landscape suffers from the same kind of artificial scarcity that plagues housing. Just as zoning blocks housing supply, intellectual property law encloses culture — converting what was once a living commons into a gated estate, where the price of admission is a licensing agreement and the penalty for trespassing is a lawsuit.
The case for reforming our intellectual property regime isn’t a niche legal argument. It is, at its core, an argument for abundance — for a culture as dynamic, competitive, and generative as the best version of our economy.
The Narrative Operating System
The true cost of this enclosure becomes clear when we recognize a fundamental truth about human societies: civilizational continuity isn’t merely biological. It’s also driven by narrative.
Every society survives by passing down a code: stories about heroes, villains, justice, sacrifice, and the collective ideals worth striving for. These narratives aren’t just decorative entertainment we consume after a hard day’s work; they are the foundational software of society — the operating system that dictates how we cooperate, think, and dream.
Human history has always treated this operating system as open-source. The Greeks didn’t sue each other over iterations of the Trojan War.1 The medieval world endlessly remixed Arthurian legend, adding regional knights and magical flourishes across centuries.2 Renaissance writers treated classical mythology like a public sandbox.3 Virgil riffed on Homer.4 Dante cast Virgil as his literal tour guide through the afterlife.5 Shakespeare pilfered from historical chronicles and Italian novellas without receiving a single cease-and-desist letter.6
Human creativity has rarely emerged from a vacuum. It’s always been an intergenerational relay race of inheritance, reinterpretation, and renewal. One generation receives the code, patches it, adds their own flavor, and passes it forward.
This open-source evolution is how cultures stay alive.
The impulse to participate in this process has never disappeared. People still inherit stories and make them their own. Fanfiction communities expand fictional universes. Internet memes endlessly remix familiar characters and narratives. Online creators reinterpret existing myths for new audiences and new eras.
Yet much of this activity exists in a strange legal twilight. It survives not because our institutions encourage cultural participation, but because enforcement remains imperfect and selective. The cultural commons has not vanished entirely, but it has increasingly been pushed to the margins — tolerated in practice while discouraged in principle.
The danger is not that cultural inheritance disappears overnight. It is that a society gradually forgets that participation is supposed to be the norm. When we freeze a story in place and forbid people from altering it, we transform a living myth into a sterile museum exhibit — admired, perhaps, but entirely disconnected from the present. A living culture demands active participation, not passive preservation.
The Corporate Enclosure of the Imagination
This organic chain of human creativity ran smoothly for millennia — until it slammed headfirst into the modern legal machinery of intellectual property.
The original American framework for copyright was relatively modest and deeply pragmatic. Its goal was simple: to grant creators a brief, temporary monopoly so they could financially benefit from their labor and feel incentivized to make more. The U.S. Constitution explicitly states these exclusive rights are to be granted only for a “limited time.”7 Historically, once that brief window closed, creators had to return the work to the public domain, where it could become raw material for the next generation.
Over the last century, corporate lobbying fundamentally warped this bargain — and the numbers tell the story.
Under current law, copyright for an individual author lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years. For corporate works — think every major studio franchise — the term is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.8 These aren’t minor extensions; they are multigenerational lockdowns. A film made before most living Americans were born can still be owned, controlled, and litigated over by a company that had nothing to do with its original creation.
Whenever these already-extraordinary terms have threatened to run out, Congress has reliably stepped in to extend them. The 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act — pointedly dubbed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act by its critics — added 20 years to existing terms, largely to prevent Disney’s most valuable early characters from slipping into the public domain.9
Even without fresh legislation, companies deploy tactical maneuvers to prolong their control. Through “copyright evergreening,” media companies layer new copyrights onto aging franchises, creating overlapping rights that extend practical control over valuable characters and stories beyond their original terms.10 A slightly redesigned character costume, a remastered edition with new liner notes, or a revised logo each becomes the basis for a fresh filing that functionally extends cultural monopolies.
The Trademark Two-Step
Yet, even these aggressive copyright maneuvers have a theoretical expiration date. To establish a more permanent stronghold over the modern imagination, the entertainment industry began weaponizing an entirely different legal vehicle: trademark law.
Trademark law was originally designed for a narrow, sensible purpose: to protect consumers from confusion about the commercial source of a product. A company’s name, logo, or slogan could be protected indefinitely, because these marks help buyers know whom they’re dealing with.11 That is a legitimate and useful function.
What trademark was never meant to do was serve as a permanent cultural monopoly. But that is precisely what it has become. Lightsabers. Ewoks. The Millennium Falcon. Disney holds trademarks for all of these cultural icons.12 These icons aren’t just products; they are defining touchstones of our shared mythology, and many will remain fenced off by trademarks long after their original copyrights lapse.
The corporate enclosure of the imagination therefore never expires. It just switches legal vehicles.
Combined with copyright extensions and evergreening, this legal regime has produced a state-backed cultural cartel that provides certain companies with a permanent claim on the cultural commons — something the Constitution never intended, the Founders would not recognize, and any genuine free market would reject.
From Participants to Consumers
This legal shift did something far worse than just alter market economics — it fundamentally altered our psychological relationship with our own culture. When a society’s core myths are locked away behind century-long legal walls, citizens stop being active participants in a living tradition. They are downgraded to mere consumers of a heavily managed product.
To understand the scale of what we’ve lost under this regime, look at how the masterpieces of our past were actually built.
Imagine if the estate of Homer had retained the exclusive rights to the Trojan War. Virgil’s Aeneid would have been killed by a licensing dispute. Dante’s Divine Comedy would have been tied up in litigation by Virgil’s lawyers. Shakespeare would have been sued into bankruptcy before finishing his historical plays.
Much of Western civilization simply would not exist if ancient stories had been treated as state-backed monopolies zoned like private real estate. These narratives survived precisely because they belonged to no one in perpetuity, which meant they were available to everyone.
This is not a call to abolish copyright or strip artists of their livelihoods. Far from it. Creators deserve compensation, and markets remain one of the most powerful engines for creative discovery ever devised.
However, we must stop confusing a temporary financial incentive with a permanent cultural entitlement. When we allow companies to hoard modern imagination indefinitely, we don’t just protect profits — we starve the future of its right to create and dissolve the very market dynamism and competition required to renew our culture.
Building a Cultural Commons
Fixing this institutional bottleneck does not require a legal scorched-earth policy. It requires restoring a forgotten balance by decoupling the original expression of a work from the broader mythology it creates — and two reforms, taken together, would get us most of the way there.
The first is rationalizing copyright terms by separating original expression from derivative works. For individual creators, a term tied to the life of the author remains defensible — it protects the person who actually made the work. For corporate works, a reasonable exclusivity period — such as 50 years from publication — protects the original expression. However, the right to create derivative works — sequels, spin-offs, and new adaptations — should expire within a single generation, perhaps 20 years from publication.
The second measure is restoring trademark to its original lane. Trademark protection should cover what it was always meant to cover: company names, logos, and slogans — the marks that tell consumers who made something. It should not function as an intellectual property backstop that provides perpetual control over characters, creatures, and fictional objects once copyright lapses. That use of trademark law in this manner is a distortion, and unwinding it is not radical; it is simply a return to the original purpose.
Consider what that inheritance would unlock.
Under a restored cultural commons, the great mythologies of our time would become genuinely available — not just to scholars or satirists operating under narrow fair-use carve-outs, but to any filmmaker, writer, or storyteller with a vision.
Disney could still make Star Wars films. But so could Universal, Paramount, independent filmmakers, animation studios, and even a first-time director with a radically different vision. Competing interpretations would rise and fall on artistic merit rather than legal exclusivity.
This renewal is not a recipe for chaos — it is the same creative vitality that gave us a dozen brilliant retellings of Hamlet and a hundred unforgettable takes on Achilles. Studios would compete on quality rather than ownership, and culture would flourish with new voices, new visions, and new myths worthy of our time.
Unleashing Cultural Abundance
A dynamic culture requires a baseline of creative generosity and the fundamental understanding that stories are meant to be gifts passed forward, rather than assets to be locked away.
For most of human history, that generosity was assumed. Stories were the common inheritance of the people who told them, and each generation added its voice to an ongoing conversation that no single institution owned.
What we have built over the last century is something alien to that tradition: a legal architecture designed to freeze culture in place, extract rents from it indefinitely, and ensure that the most powerful stories of our time remain the permanent property of the companies that commercialize them.
This artificial scarcity is not a law of nature. It is the result of specific, reversible legislative choices made under the weight of corporate lobbying — and choices can be unmade.
Promoting cultural abundance doesn’t demand a radical leap into the unknown, nor does it require inventing a new economic framework from scratch. The foundational blueprint already exists within our founding principles: a balanced, time-limited approach to stories and narratives designed to serve the common good before reverting to the public domain.
Our task is to restore that balance so that every generation is free to tell new stories and build new worlds.
Homer, The Iliad, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51355/pg51355.rdf.
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur, https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1251.opds.
Ovid, The Metamorphoses, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/21765/pg21765.rdf.
Virgil, The Aeneid, https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/18466/also/.
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/41537/pg41537.rdf.
Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46671.opds.
U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8.
17 U.S. Code § 302, https://law.justia.com/codes/us/title-17/chapter-3/sec-302/.
The New York Times, “The Owners of Culture vs. the Free Agents,” Jan. 18, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/18/arts/connections-the-owners-of-culture-vs-the-free-agents.html.
Literary Characters in Intellectual Property Law, “Works of Fiction: The Misconception of Literary Characters as Copyright Works,” 2023, https://china.elgaronline.com/configurable/content/book$002f9781788114325$002fbook-part-9781788114325-7.xml.
Cornell Law School, “Trademark Infringement,” https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/trademark_infringement.
Open Legal, “A Handy List of Star Wars References that Might Get You Sued,” Oct. 19, 2016, https://www.openlegalblogarchive.org/2016/10/19/a-handy-list-of-star-wars-references-that-might-get-you-sued/.