I would be curious where the economic costs truly lie. Is Disney rent-seeking? Well, that would depend how many non-Disney entities are deploying Mickey Mouse

I would be curious where the economic costs truly lie. Is Disney rent-seeking? Well, that would depend how many non-Disney entities are deploying Mickey Mouse and paying royalties for so doing (probably not common). Is there Mickey Mouse content sold by Disney that would command lesser prices if a competitor could ALSO generate Mickey Mouse content? Probably (in which case consumers pay higher prices, and competitors lose the opportunity to partake of that money trough). However, the steel-manned argument for Disney is something like "look, you could always make some other character (e.g. Rowdy Rat), sell tons of them, and compete with us...what's so damned special about OURS apart from the creatives who build a world around him? If this were REALLY harming consumers, wouldn't there be all sorts of derivative works inviting lawsuits to determine what is and is not too close to the original?" The real question is whether Disney is so large and their litigiousness so frightening as to chill even that type of battle?