- The current system doesn’t protect small writers either. Look at the amount of money plagiarism gets you, with copyright law in effect.
And
- at the stage where you’re big enough for copyright to effectively protect you, provable publication dates take care of that problem through reputation. If you become known(read: found out) as a plagiarist, you get the boot from the public zeitgeist, never to receive public money again.
Copyright only protects the Mouse’s bottom line, and strangleholds creativity.
As… Opposed to now?
If Disney does plagiarize small artists’ work, and becomes known for it, they take a reputation hit, and the artist gets an explosion of exposure, as long as it is provable he made the original story. (Disney making million-dollar budget movies of your OC, isn’t even that bad for you, to be honest, but let’s assume that it doesn’t market the fuck out of your small artist story. In real life, stories are not in competition.)
If Disney doesn’t, then it’s an undeniable positive for worldwide creativity.
The only thing copyright protects, is big companies’ exclusive right to public-consciousness characters.