> The comment you chose to reply to was specifically about that one particular example.

Not, it wasn't. It made the following general claim about a problem that would exist without long-term copyright:

>> That would make it so just around the time your kids are old enough for you to introduce them to the great comics, cartoons, movies, music, and books of your childhood it would enter the public domain and become widely used in advertising and low budget productions. <<

> Long copyright terms seem to be doing just fine for Bill Watterson.

Perhaps its doing fine for him, but its not preventing characters -- Calvin particularly -- from Calvin and Hobbes from being ubiquitously used in our culture in a way which shifts the context in which someone newly introduced to the source works might experience them. Sure, its not specifically "marketing toys and junk food", but rather expressing preferences, but its not fundamentally different from the perspective of the kind of cultural context concern raised generally in the post I was responding to.

I don't think I follow your second graph, but you might be suggesting that copyright aside, Calvin is frequently used in stickers on the backs of Chevy and Ford trucks. Those stickers are counterfeit. They've been the subject of legal action, and if they aren't today, it's because Watterson doesn't care enough to go after their small-potatoes producers.

> I don't think I follow your second graph, but you might be suggesting that copyright aside, Calvin is frequently used in stickers on the backs of Chevy and Ford trucks.

Hardly limited to those two (either as locations or subject matter), but, sure, that's one aspect of the use.

> Those stickers are counterfeit.

Irrelevant to the cultural point under discussion, which has to do with what potential future people may be bombarded with in their environment before seeing the source work, not what is legally considered genuine or counterfeit.

> They've been the subject of legal action, and if they aren't today, it's because Watterson doesn't care enough to go after their small-potatoes producers.

Whether Watterson cares is, again, irrelevant, since the issue raised wasn't about the concerns of creators, but how extended copyright protects fans of work from having their children subjected to various forms of unwanted portrayals of the character, etc., of the work before those fans are able to introduce those children to the work in general. Both the specific kinds of unwanted portrayals pointed to as examples ("TV pitchmen for toys and junk food") of the general problem for the general class of works at issue ("great comics, cartoons, movies, music, and books of your childhood") and similar ubiquitous cultural portrayals not effectively controlled by the author (the stickers) for the specific work cited as an example ("Calvin & Hobbes"), so I don't think that there is much evidence that the current effectively-perpetual copyright does much to prevent the general problem being pointed to.

Even if that problem is agreed to be a problem whose prevention warrants government action restricting human freedom (a position I think is itself far from uncontroversial), I think its pretty clear that the existing copyright regime isn't an effective intervention to acheive that end, and so cannot be justified as a solution to that problem.