Maybe. It also stifles other creative endeavors that could be done with those characters by other authors. Lots of cool stuff is done with things in public doma

Maybe. It also stifles other creative endeavors that could be done with those characters by other authors. Lots of cool stuff is done with things in public domain (think Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, plenty of others), and I don't buy an argument that people would stop creating new things if they could simply copy someone else's.