I don't think this is the same. The pirate bay is just straight up infringing causing lost sales. Reddit or memes/derivative works in this sense don't directly

I don't think this is the same. The pirate bay is just straight up infringing causing lost sales. Reddit or memes/derivative works in this sense don't directly impact the work unless there are serious branding issues that result from it. The profit Reddit gets in this case isn't really due to the work in a way that takes away from the original creator, and it may benefit them. Many indie games would love to go viral and reddit. It's more trying to control all forms of hosting. Oh, and you don't want mickey mouse in the public domain. We already have characters like him in it, Betty Boop and Max Fleischer versions of superman are in it, and you can go buy a DVD for under $10 usa that has hundreds of public domain cartoons. What happens when something is put in the public domain is often no one has any incentive to care for, advertise, curate, or promote the characters. Yes, you can view the content for free, but it's almost always done in a basic or slapdash form, maybe a bad vhs rip or ebook with scanning errors. You often very rarely see actual new works based on the properties, because no company has an existing interest to keep the brand fresh. Honestly copyright is the only reason some characters even endure. Woody Woodpecker would have died out had lantz not sold the shorts to universal, for example.