> seeing as it created those ideas (like Mickey Mouse, etc) Mickey Mouse, perhaps[0]. Many other Disney characters and broad ideas were ripped off of public do

> seeing as it created those ideas (like Mickey Mouse, etc) Mickey Mouse, perhaps[0]. Many other Disney characters and broad ideas were ripped off of public domain work (sometimes it's even more complicated, see Winnie the Pooh - the original character was created by someone else and later licensed to Disney, but there certainly was a lot of subsequent controversy about the precise terms of that licensing deal!) with Disney then laying proprietary claims on them, and also lobbying for extended protections on their newly-proprietarized forms. That's a particularly obnoxious form of copyright trolling. [0] Though, in many ways, Mickey Mouse is simply a technically-simplified form (serving the new medium of cartoon animation, which Walt Disney was then experimenting with) of an existing genre of cartoon/comic anthropomorphic mice (of which 'Teddy Tail' is the best-documented representative). Serendipitously, the changes - although introduced for merely technical reasons - also made the character a lot more popular, for the same reason why ubercheap anime characters from Japan are popular - humans are attracted to simple forms, symmetry and easily-read neotenous traits, and repelled by complexity and artistry. So Walt Disney had a good intuition to start with, but his creative success was for the most part a matter of serendipity and being in the right place. No way his character is worth billions of dollars - no anthropomorphic mouse in the freakin' noosphere is! /s