Professor says Disney, other firms typify what's wrong with copyrights
03/14/2002
AUSTIN, Texas – Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig is waging a
lonely fight to free Mickey Mouse.
Most of his audience last weekend had no idea Mickey had even been
trapped. But by the time Mr. Lessig finished with a 90-minute multimedia
presentation on the future of copyright and intellectual property,
images of the world-famous cartoon character behind bars were indelibly
etched on their collective psyche.
As a result, the ability of the Internet to provide the building blocks
for innovation has been shackled, and the creative process that allowed
Walt Disney to build his cartoon dynasty has been snuffed, Mr. Lessig
said.
Unless copyright laws are dramatically altered, Mr. Lessig told the
Austin Convention Center audience, "There will be nobody who can do what
Disney did, ever again."
For several years, Mr. Lessig – named by Business Week as
one of the 25 most influential people in electronic business – has
joined public interest and civil libertarian groups in challenging the
right of Congress to extend copyright terms.
Thus far, government lawyers have successfully defended extensions as a
way to prevent "dilution" of artists' works and as "good for the arts."
Using the power of their lawyers and lobbyists – and a parade of artists
whom Mr. Lessig calls "stooges" – large media companies have pushed
Congress into extending copyrights 11 times in the last century.
In 1790, copyrights lasted only 14 years. When they lapsed, creative
works such as the fables of the Brothers Grimm entered the public
domain, where Mr. Disney used them to create Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs and other characters that built his empire.
But with the 1998 extension, known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term
Extension Act, the protection period was extended to 70 years after the
death of the creator, and works owned by corporations were protected for
95 years.
The 1998 extension, which Mr. Lessig calls the "Mickey Mouse Protection
Act," has given corporations too much authority over new film works,
computer code, music distribution and all manner of creative processes,
he said.
"They've used their power to protect themselves against innovation,
which is exactly what the copyright was originally set up to guard
against," Mr. Lessig said.
To illustrate the problem, Mr. Lessig told how a public television
documentary by Davis Guggenheim was recently held up by attorneys who
demanded a hefty licensing fee because two seconds of The Simpsons
were shown playing on a television in one schoolhouse scene.
When author Alice Randall took the plot of the 1936 novel Gone With
the Wind and created another version from a slave's perspective,
The Wind Done Gone, she was slapped with a lawsuit that cost more
than $100,000 to overcome. Lawyers for Gone With the Wind's
publisher were even demanding that all printed copies of The Wind
Done Gone be incinerated.
"We came from a free speech tradition," Mr. Lessig said. "What happened?
It's been bought off."
Copyright has its place, and artists should be compensated for their
works, Mr. Lessig said. But continually extending copyrights hurts
society, he said.
"If copyright is perpetual and there are perpetual copyright controls,
the creative process dramatically decreases," Mr. Lessig said.
It is particularly galling, Mr. Lessig said, that powerful media
companies have attempted to portray their copyright lobbying as noble
fights on behalf of the artists whose work they distribute.
Actually, copyright extensions produce little or no money for the
artists, while they extend the reach of corporations into all segments
of society, Mr. Lessig said. Musicians such as Bob Dylan have become
corporate "stooges" as they testify that they've been irreparably
damaged by alleged copyright infringements, he said.
At the same time, more artists are being dragged into court on charges
that their works vaguely resemble other people's creations, he said.
The public has been left confused by the debate, he said.
"Our problem as a culture is that all of us identify with the idea of a
free exchange of ideas, but we also think, 'Why shouldn't Disney own
Mickey for all time? They created him,' " Mr. Lessig said.
The Internet and new technologies, in particular, are suffering.
On one hand, Apple Computer features ads that urge users to "rip, mix,
burn" and enjoy manipulating music files on their personal computers. On
the other, attorneys for media conglomerates are busy branding those who
do as pirates and outlaws.
"Artists rip, mix and burn the cultural past," Mr. Lessig said. "There's
no such thing as creativity that doesn't build on the past."
Mr. Lessig has successfully petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a
case that could roll back the copyright protections on thousands of
books, songs and movies.
Later this year, he will represent Eric Eldred, who runs a free Internet
library that offers the text of about 50 classic books, poems and essays
that are in the public domain.
The stranglehold that copyrights hold on thousands of other vital works,
Mr. Lessig and Mr. Eldred will argue, is allowing the material to die,
unused. And that, they contend, was not the intent of the original
copyright laws enacted by Congress.
Beyond that, Mr. Lessig is working to produce a labeling system that
would allow artists to waive or reduce copyright constraints on the
reuse of their work in the public domain and "take the lawyers out of
the entire process."
"The public domain is a lawyer-free zone," Mr. Lessig said. "This is the
public domain we need to rediscover and support.
"Free Mickey."
E-mail dbedell@dallasnews.com
