03/14/2002

By DOUG BEDELL / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig is waging a lonely fight to free Mickey Mouse.

Most of his audience last weekend at the SXSW Interactive Festival 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.

TAYLOR JONES / Special to DMN Lawrence Lessig notes that the length of copyrights has grown from 14 years to 95 years for a corporation.

Mr. Lessig repeatedly flashed images of the imprisoned rodent onto a nearby video screen to make his point: Corporations such as Walt Disney Co. have successfully pressed for extensions of copyright powers far beyond the intent of the Constitution's framers.

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