think less House of Mouse and more like “screws, but different”
What are you talking about with “screws, but different”? Are you confusing patent law. with copyright law…?
Patents protect the design and/or mechanism of physical inventions vs copyright which protects written works (books, articles, papers, source code, etc) and similar media assets (music, movies, tv shows, etc) from unauthorized reproduction?
WRT patents, I agree they suck, and they need rethought (or at least, there needs to be a much higher bar to getting a patent).
Copyright law as currently implemented limits expression and prevents expansion of ideas
Copyright does very little to limit expression and actually encourages people to come up with original work vs simply reproducing or altering in the smallest way possible an existing work. Through fair use, copyright even permits sufficiently derived works like parodies and satire.