Copyright Length And The Life Of Mickey Mouse

from the exploring-the-details dept

Last week, we reported on Rep. Zoe Lofgren's statement that copyright law has become equal to the life of Mickey Mouse. Tom Bell has a couple of recent posts exploring issues related to Mickey Mouse and copyright, that seem worth exploring, given Rep. Lofgren's recognition of this fact. While he notes (as we have) that there's ample evidence to suggest that the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons really are in the public domain, he first explores how the length of copyright has followed the age of Mickey Mouse:

James Boyle then weighs in to point out that even that chart exaggerates the true length of copyright over that period of time, as for much of the timeframe shown in the chart content creators (1) had to register to get the copyright and (2) had to regularly renew the copyright to keep it. When you look at the real length of time that works were covered by copyright, it was significantly less than the maximum, because only a small percentage of people even bothered to register copyrights in the first place, and of those that did, only a tiny fraction renewed them. Compare that to today when you get a copyright the second you create something new, and it lasts until 70 years past your death. We've gone from the true median length of copyright being zero to well over 100 years in an incredibly short period of time.

And for what purpose?

Bell notes that Disney honestly wouldn't lose that much even if there were no copyright on the early Mickey Mouse films. Yes, people would be able to do some new things with the Mickey Mouse found in Steamboat Willie (though, not the more modern Mickey Mouse), but Disney would still hold the trademark on the Mouse and could probably stop plenty of uses.

But, really, the bigger point was made by Boyle, via Twitter, where he noted that we are "the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves and to drive the point home, he notes that no work created during your lifetime will, without conscious action by its creator, become available for you to build upon. For people who don't recognize the importance of the public domain and the nature of creativity, perhaps this seems like no big deal. But if you look back through history, you realize what an incredibly big deal it is -- and how immensely stifling this is on our culture. And then you realize this is all done under a law whose sole purpose is to "promote the progress" and you begin to wonder how this happened. It goes back beyond Mickey Mouse, certainly, but Mickey and Disney have been huge drivers of this attempt to stifle new culture, all in the name of limiting competition for itself. What a shame.

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The Other Future Of Copyright: The Draconian Suffocating One

from the well,-that's-unpleasant dept

The fourth piece in the Cato Institute's Future of Copyright series is a bit bizarre. Written by Tom Bell, who we've mentioned before for his efforts to get people to start calling "intellectual property" "intellectual privilege", it attempts to take a look at the "other" future of copyright. It's sort of the opposite scenario to Rasmus Fleischer's opening piece imagining a world without copyright. Bell's piece tries to get into the mindset of a Hollywood exec, explaining why it seems to make sense to make copyright more and more draconian in an effort to make the "costs" of infringement go up by attacking infringers with everything they've got. Of course, this isn't surprising, and even Bell sort of makes the half-hearted case for it, as he admits at the end. If anything, Bell comes to the conclusion that because we haven't already seen even more draconian copyright laws put in place, it may mean that even Big Content execs recognize the differences between copyright and real property. Still, I'm kind of surprised to find out that Cato couldn't at least get a Big Copyright exec to put up their opinion for this particular piece.

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