I doubt any Star Trek will enter public domain while CBS still owns copyright to it. As long as the network (or any successor) is a going concern, the copyright is still active. All writers, authors, etc worked under license and don't own any part of Star Trek. It's a cash cow and they won't let it lapse.
The only reason Mickey's copyright lapsed is solely because it's really Steamboat Willie, not Mickey Mouse as we know him. Walt Disney didn't understand copyright law and neither did his lawyers, or they'd have done better. CBS lawyers understand copyright much better, and the laws have changed over the years.
Keep writing your fanfic.
There is no way to “extend” a copyright” beyond the fixed number specified in the U.S. Copyright Act, regardless of how crafty the attorney is. No amount of savvy corporate maneuvering can get around that, as Disney found recently. The only way – the
only way – to extend the duration of an existing copyright is for the U.S. Congress to amend the Copyright Act to change the duration set forth in the statute. This has actually been done several times in the past,(1976, 1998) – usually a result of Disney‘s extensive lobbying (this is why both the 1976 Copyright Act and the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act are variously referred to as “the Disney laws” or “the Mickey Mouse Protection Act“ because both of them resulted largely from Disney's efforts to keep Steamboat Willie from going into the public domain, which was imminent in 1976 and 1998 under the then-current version of the statute). So, no, Steamboat Will went into the public domain
despite Disney's best efforts over decades of lobbying, not because "Walt Disney didn't understand copyright law and neither did his lawyers,"
Are further revisions to the statute to extend the term of copyright possible between now and 2062? Anything is possible. But the problem we run against is that the US Copyright Act is subject to the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8), which permits Congress to grant copyright only for a “limited time" (on the rationale that the copyright owner should not hold a monopoly forever, and the trade-off for giving the copyright owner a time-limited monopoly is that eventually he or she must relinquish it to the public domain). Given that until 1976, copyright duration was limited to
28 years (with one permitted 28 year extension) and now it is
95 years (in the case of corporations) and
"lifetime of the author PLUS 70 more years" (for individuals), there has been a lot of resistance to further extending the duration of copyright because Congress has already stretched a "limited" time to its breaking point and further extensions may be unconstitutional. This is why we didn’t see Congressional movement to protect Steamboat Willie one last time in the 2020s before it went into the public domain.
Source – me, U.S. intellectual property lawyer practicing since 1998
Mike
