Disney Poised to Win Copyright Battle
By Alex Berenson Senior Writer
Walt Disney (DIS:NYSE) can breathe easy.
Sometime in the next week, President Clinton is almost certain to sign a bill that will extend U.S. copyright protection by 20 years, keeping Mickey Mouse out of the public domain until at least 2024. Passage of the copyright extension legislation will mark a major victory for Hollywood, which waged a low-key lobbying campaign this year to make sure Congress would pass the bill without much public attention.
That's just what happened. After sitting in the Senate Judiciary Committee for months, the bill was discharged to the Senate floor on Oct. 7. The Senate and House passed the legislation the same day and delivered it to the President a week later. The White House hasn't indicated any objection to the bill, which is all but certain to become law.
The bill's passage was briefly in doubt, as Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts threatened to insert language forcing movie studios to share any profits they made from copyright extension with the screenwriters, actors and directors who created the films. But in a display of Hollywood's lobbying power, Jack Valenti, who heads the Motion Picture Association of America, personally promised Kennedy that the studios would negotiate in good faith with the guilds representing the industry's creative professionals. The word of Valenti, who has represented the movie industry in Washington for 30 years, convinced Kennedy to drop his opposition to the legislation.
"It was helpful to the endgame for Jack to make very clear that intention [to negotiate] ... even though we had pledged that before to the guild," MPAA vice president Rich Taylor says.
The new law will lengthen both corporate and individually owned copyrights by 20 years, so corporate-owned copyrights now last 95 years and individually owned ones for the life of the author plus and an additional 70 years. While the amount of money immediately at stake was slight, had Congress not extended the copyright term, a vast trove of movies and cartoons that were created in the late 1920s would have begun entering the public domain in the next few years. Disney, whose animated characters are at the core of its business, faced especially serious risks. (An earlier TSC story took a longer look at the legislation.)
"They did what I feared they would do, which was keep the thing low profile and slide it through at the end of the session when hardly anybody was looking," says Arizona State University law professor Dennis Karjala, who led the ragtag coalition of academics and librarians opposed to copyright extension. Karjala says that indefinite expansions of copyright protection distort the U.S. Constitution, which specifically mandates that intellectual property be protected for only a "limited" time before it enters the public domain and becomes freely available to everyone.
"It all happened without public discussion," Karjala says. "I'm sorry that our supposed democratic system works that way, but there you have it."
Not surprisingly, Taylor disagrees. "We're very pleased. It was one of our legislative priorities -- we think it was good for the industry as well as good for the nation as a whole."