excreationist

Well that's common with people who own copyrights - they borrow things from the public domain.
The Disney corporation, like most other corporations, just want to maximize profits (who cares about hypocracy, etc?) - and having some of their things go to the public domain involves a loss of some profits.
BTW, the possibility of copyright being extended indefinitely affects every copyrighted work from 1923 onwards including the song "Happy Birthday to You". (Owned by Warner/Chappell Music and earns about $2 million in revenue a year)

lisarea

Actually, most of their stories are based on traditional fairy tales and such, for which there was never any copyright to begin with.

These stories are usually of unknown origin, and were passed down orally over the years. The Brothers Grimm were actually linguists (and damned good ones, too--they really did some seminal work). During the course of their linguistic research, they started collecting traditional European fairy tales, and compiled them into the well-known Grimm's Fairy Tales almost as an afterthought.

What Disney did was bowdlerize them. He removed the sex and death--in other words, the POINT--of those stories and adapted them to create disgustingly sanitized versions of the originals we have all come to know and despise.

Ahem. Sorry. Yet another item on the seemingly endless list of "topics that set me off."