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FREE THE MOUSE? The U.S. Supreme Court this week will consider the legality of 1998 legislation that extends millions of copyrights for an extra twenty years, reports Larry Downes in an opinion essay published in USA Today. On one side of the argument are entertainment companies, most visibly Walt Disney, that fear the loss of valuable intellectual property if their creations default into the public domain when copyright terms expire. On the other side is a clutch of "libraries authors, film preservationists, civil libertarians and legal scholars," led by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig. They argue that the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) stifles creativity, the premise being that creativity is mostly about taking someone else's work and making it your own. Heck, even Shakespeare "borrowed plots, titles and even the names of characters."
Originally, the term limit on copyrights was just 14 years, however Congress has given extensions on copyrights for "books, film and music" eleven times over the past 40 years. CETA "extends the right to the life of the author plus 70 years." The irony is, Disney's own copyrights are based on previous works: "Snow White and Cinderella came from Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Hunchback of Notre Dame from Victor Hugo, and the score of Fantasia from such classical composers as Bach and Beethoven." Steamboat Willie, "the first Mickey Mouse cartoon," was "itself a parody of a Buster Keaton movie." Mr. Downes argues: "The Little Mermaid, Pinocchio and The Jungle book...are all 'owned' by the public. Yet the ability of Disney and others to freely exploit them did not destroy the value of the original creations any more than it undermined the incentives for writers and artists to create new characters."
Because passage of copyright extension legislation over the years has tended to coincide with the expiration of Walt Disney's earliest work, the anti-CTEA faction has adopted "Free the Mouse!" as their rallying cry. They even have T-Shirts, bumperstickers and buttons behind it. However they also note that the copyrights in question apply only to Disney's earliest properties, "and even then Disney would be able to swing its might trademark club to limit the ways in which they can be used." Downes concludes: "The mighty rivers that once fed the public domain have been slowed to a trickle, and this act threatens to dam them up. Without constant refreshment, our ocean of creative genius will become a dead sea, and everyone will lose."
Tim Manners, editor
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