"It's time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers," said George Lucas in announcing the sale of his company today. But there's a significant group of filmmakers unlikely to fare well now that the Star Wars franchise is Disney-owned: the amateur "unauthorized" filmmakers, who enjoyed relatively liberal copyright policies while they were making remixes and fan fiction based on the Star Wars universe.

The Star Wars movies practically created their own genre of fan movies and fan fiction. Since 2002, Lucasfilm has actually hosted "Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards," offering recognition and prizes to fans who make their own films using Star Wars characters and settings.

Many of those works were spoofs or commentary set in the Star Wars world. One of the most popular early fan movies was Troops, a knockoff of the TV show Cops. In the movie, Imperial Storm Troopers irritably scour the rough neighborhoods of Tatooine looking for various types of lawbreakers. (Droid thieves, of course, feature prominently.)

In 2007, Lucasfilm even released tools that would more easily enable remixing of Star Wars content. A top Lucasfilm lawyer, Jeffrey Ulin, began speaking at conferences and to the media about the value of fan mash-ups and remixes. Those works were "part of keeping the love of Star Wars and the franchise alive... We're really trying to position ourselves for the next 30 years," Ulin told the Wall Street Journal in 2007.

The approach still had its critics—most prominently copyright guru Lawrence Lessig, who called Lucasfilm's authorized remixing a kind of "digital sharecropping," since Lucasfilm owned exclusive rights to anything produced with those tools. Still, it seemed to represent a step forward. While there are rules—no nudity or graphic violence is featured in the works—fan works were embraced to a far larger degree than at other companies with similarly famous properties.

Certainly, Disney fans who make their own movie featuring Mickey Mouse are more likely to get a cease-and-desist letter from a Disney lawyer than an award. After all, it was Disney who famously lobbied Congress to extend copyright terms in 1998, so much so that some dubbed the new law the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

Perhaps no single company more than Disney bears more responsibility for the sorry state of the US public domain, which hasn't seen any significant works added to it in decades. For the most part, culture after 1923 has been frozen in a state of private ownership—mostly owned by the large media corporations that began rising at about that time.

It's a shame. More than any other modern work, Star Wars—with the explosion of fan creativity and enthusiasm it has produced—shows the need for a vigorous public domain. As Ars contributor Tim Lee noted today, if we had the copyright that existed at the time of the founders—14 years renewable once—the original Star Wars movie would have passed into the public domain in 2005. The sequels would have become public property in 2008 and 2011, respectively.

It's hard to imagine that this hypothetical world would be one that's poorer, culturally speaking, than the one we live in today. With a 95-year copyright on corporate-owned works, we aren't scheduled to have a discussion about what the public might do with Luke Skywalker—and about the rich world of unauthorized spinoffs, sequels, and remakes that could be created—until 2072. Now that Star Wars is owned by a company so determined to stave off the public domain, we can't really count on it happening then, either.