Tag: Mickey Mouse

The Age of the Mouse is Nigh!

And the fairy that is called Tinkerbell said, come and see. And I saw, and behold, a Mouse with large black ears. And the name that said on him was Mirth. And Joy followed with him.

And to those who may feel anxious about the coming year, I say unto thee, fear not. Whatever your concerns for the fate of the world—however well-founded—take comfort. For a new era begins at Midnight on the first day of the year 2024. Of course, I speak not of the Lamb of Revelations, but of the Mouse of Disney, and the day when the Copyright seal will be broken, and Mickey, in the form of Steamboat Willie, will rise (not fall) into the Public Domain. Rejoice! Let the Angels sound their trumpets! For the Age of the Mouse is upon us. And Mankind shall be saved.

But perhaps you think I exaggerate. Verily, you say, the passing of a cartoon character out of Copyright cannot bring about an era of new enlightenment and goodwill. Indeed, I was tempted to believe as you do. But like most Men of ordinary sense, I was not blessed with the vision of the Prophets—those sages, who read from the Book of Lessig, and proclaim that since the year 1998, Man has robbed himself of his own Culture, keeping the most sacred expressions in a Babylonian bondage called the Copyright Term Extension Act. Yea, though the Prophets bore false witness and beguiled the People, saying that the Act of Sonny Bono and the other Philistines was made unto law for the wicked purpose of keeping the Mouse in bondage, let us not quibble over the petty facts of History.

For on this New Year’s Day, the Mouse shall be set free, and the People will speak His name, and he shall say unto the first of his Disciples, Come on, Pluto! And Pluto will go on. He will follow the Mouse. And more Disciples will come and see. And the People will see and hear. And again, the Mouse will say, Come on! And the People will go on. For the Mouse shall then belong to all the People. Or at least, in a limited sense, this will be so.

And the days of the New Year, and all the years that follow, shall be known as the era of Mickey Remix. And the Remix will sweep across the Earth as like a gentle breeze, and Man shall come to know his own folly, and he shall be as though reborn. He will lay down the arms of war and abandon the politics of hate. And reason, compassion, and knowledge will, at last, be the hallmarks of civilization. Verily, these things must come to pass. For if the events foretold do not transpire with the ascension of the Mouse to the Public Domain, then the Prophets are indeed false and deserving of scorn.

If the Mouse merely passes into the realm beyond the copyright term, and Man remains in the same state of ignorance and peril as on this day, then it shall be known that the Prophets are deceivers. If on the second day of the New Year, and all the days that follow, Man is much the same as before, then the Prophets have dissembled and have wasted more than twenty-five times three hundred sixty-five days peddling mere trivia as wisdom. We shall know soon. For the day of reckoning is nigh. The grace of the Mouse be with you all.

Mousetrap: The Copyright Deep Story Behind Today’s Lies

It seems that after Public Knowledge came out, guns blazing, and just plain making things up about copyright extensions in the new round of NAFTA negotiations, they and their supporters tried to tiptoe these statements back on Twitter by blaming the USTR for its lack of clarity. While I have little doubt that such vagueness is present—certainly if the USTR’s own press release is any indication—this does not excuse manufacturing a story and blasting it all over the internet, not least because a moment’s thought was all PK needed to conclude that what they were about to say probably wasn’t true. But once these things are on the internet and spread, well…what was never true in the morning will be true in many minds by five o’clock.

There are only two explanations for someone perpetrating an outright lie: ignorance or corruption. Either one is innocently misinformed and, therefore, unqualified to speak on the given subject; or one is purposely spreading falsehoods and, therefore, undeserving of anyone’s trust. And I suppose we have to acknowledge a hybrid of the two whereby one becomes so entrenched in an ideology (e.g. an anti-copyright agenda) that one remains willfully ignorant in order to feel less corrupt while spreading lies.

And that little sermon brings us to the tweet posted by Public Knowledge’s Senior Vice President Harold Feld, originally written to draw reader attention to the organization’s memo about the invented copyright extension in new NAFTA …

 

This is a fine example of a “deep story” as described by Alice Marwick in her paper about why we share fake news. For some Americans, their deep story is that immigrants are destroying the nation; for others, it’s a vast Jewish conspiracy; for many, it’s that vaccines cause autism; and for the anti-copyright zealot, it’s that Mickey Mouse has long been the primary (if not the sole) reason for term extensions in American copyright law. And because this is a deep story with roots in millions of minds, I’m not calling out Feld personally so much as by example; only he knows whether his tweet is more a manifestation of ignorance or corruption.

So, once again, I feel compelled to clarify a salient point about copyright history; and I apologize if this gets a little technical and arcane, but here it goes: Mickey Mouse had sweet fuck all to do with the current U.S. copyright term.

That’s not an opinion or a counter-narrative or an alternative fact. The Mouse story, while plausible and attractive to many, just ain’t so; and no self-respecting copyright scholar would allow it to be repeated as “history” because they know that the development of copyright term length dates back at least 160 years before Mickey first appeared on screen. Here’s a synopsis …

In Millar v. Taylor (1769), the English court held that a perpetual copyright existed at common law until statutory copyright—the Statute of Anne ratified in 1710—placed a limit (albeit a necessary one) on the duration of the term. By the late 1830s, France already had a posthumous term based on life of the author plus ten years; and England began debating a similar regime predicated on a bill that would have extended the term to life of the author plus 60 years. A version of that bill passed in 1842 with a term of life of the author plus seven years, or 42 years, whichever was the longer.

With the Berne Convention treaty of 1886, England, France, and other signatory nations much smaller than the U.S. continued to extend terms, eventually mandating life of the author plus 50 in 1948. Meanwhile, throughout the 19th century, the United States dragged its feet for about sixty years in ratifying any kind of international copyright law (doing so in 1891) and only codified a life-of-the-author-plus-50 regime in the 1976 Copyright Act—nearly 70 years after those terms were first adopted on a voluntary basis in Berne.

When the U.S. finally joined Berne in 1989 (103 years after its origination), this was just in time to play catch-up once again as Europe was about to coalesce into the EU in 1992. The European Parliament settled on a term of life of the author plus 70 years, thus providing grounds for the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which amended the 1976 law to conform to the terms adopted by the EU and other key trading nations.

That’s a digest version of term length and how it got that way, but suffice to say that Mickey Mouse’s debut performance in Steamboat Willie in 1928 is not even a footnote in the evolution of widely-adopted, international copyright terms to which the U.S. eventually had to adhere if it wanted to join various trade agreements with some of its most important partners.

People are entitled to argue that copyright terms are too long, which is a perfectly valid topic for discussion and debate. But they are not entitled—least of all under the banner of a public-serving organization—to perpetuate conspiratorial nonsense in order to score symbolic social-media “wins” rather than provide substantive contributions. We have enough of the former in our current politics, and if that’s all the folks at Public Knowledge can bring to the table, then they don’t deserve a seat—either because they are unqualified or because they are dishonest.

Also see Brief History of US Copyright Terms at Copyhype.

Public Knowledge Twaddles Re. NAFTA Negotiations

Back in May, I reported that Cory Doctorow, “writing” for Boing Boing, literally invented a legislative process out of whole cloth in order to portray the CLASSICS Act as an 11th-hour bill written by Senator Orin Hatch. (Not even close.) But not wanting to be outdone in the dissemination of drivel, the group Public Knowledge bested Doctorow yesterday with a post headlined Public Knowledge Responds to President Trump’s Outrageous Copyright Giveaway, in which they claim that the tentatively renegotiated NAFTA with Mexico would add another five years to the U.S. copyright term, resulting in life of the author plus 75 years.

Most egregiously, PK cites itself as a source (i.e. its own Global Policy director Gus Rossi) to sate, “The inclusion of a copyright term extension in the trade agreement announced today is a staggeringly brazen attempt by the entertainment industries to launder unpopular policies through international agreements.”

That is a brazenly false statement. Not only is there no evidence to support the claim that the “entertainment industries” are pulling strings in this NAFTA reneg; if indeed they were, they’re doing a lousy job of obtaining a copyright term extension because the USTR has not agreed to anything of the kind. Near as anyone can tell, this Public Knowledge outburst, claiming that NAFTA 2.0 would add five years to the copyright term is the following hobbledehoy sentence from a USTR press release:

• Extend the minimum copyright term to 75 years for works like song performances and ensure that works such as digital music, movies, and books can be protected through current technologies such as technological protection measures and rights management information. 

Albeit a woefully vague statement, it does not say anything about “life of the author,” can best be interpreted to imply a flat term of 75 years for sound recordings, and would, therefore, not be an extension of anything in U.S. law. In fact, 75 years would comport to Mexico’s term for sound recordings (and other works), which is 20 years shorter than the U.S. term for works without authors (e.g. works made for hire).

With regard to Rossi’s allegation of “laundering policies” through Fair Trade Agreements (FTAs), this is a false representation of the actual procedure. The USTR does not have the authority to “sneak” a revision of any U.S. statute by means of an FTA. Ratifying trade agreements requires a legislative process in order to ensure that their provisions either conform to existing law or that existing law may be appropriately amended through debate and public disclosure. In other words, Public Knowledge has plenty of time to get its facts straight before spinning tales, let alone noisy ones that seek to leverage Trump criticism as a means to vilify copyright law.

An organization cannot call itself a public-service while lying to the public—perhaps least of all when the word “knowledge” is part of that organization’s name. We are already swimming in a sea of bad information, barfed up in glib, thoughtless tweets—I propose to call this twaddling from now on—and it is no less destructive to the Republic when so-called progressive organizations dissemble than when any other party does it. Public Knowledge’s track record in this regard leaves much to be desired.