Copyright and the Mouse: How Disney's Mickey Mouse Changed the World

Mickey News - Copyright and the Mouse: How Disney's Mickey Mouse Changed the World

This is an excellent article which summarizes Eisner's strategy to push changes in the copyright laws to prevent Disney assets such as Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain.

Some quotes below.

"The Lion King, for instance, followed Eisner's belief that a single film was not merely a potential box-office money-maker but an industry unto itself, capable of being spun off into a Broadway musical and licensed to play in other cities; it would also merchandise soundtrack albums and T-shirts. It could, in short, be elevated into a recognizable brand, to be applied to a variety of products with a market life much longer than a single hit film. It was just a logical extension of the practice of strategically re-releasing the old hits every so many years.

To protect his marketing model, Eisner looked carefully at the European Union, where the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1996 extended copyright protection from the author's life, plus 50 years to life, plus 70. He and other Hollywood moguls worked on the premise that such copyright protection could also be applicable to popular culture, and lobbied Washington to extend the U.S. life-plus-50 limit by 20 years to cover movies and music.

To accomplish this, Eisner and his Hollywood colleagues took a two-pronged attack. First, they drafted Sonny Bono, a junior Congressman whose career as a pop singer had plummeted after he and his wife Cher divorced. Bono drafted a bill proposing the 20-year extension and the House of Representatives, in a fit of distracted lawmaking (this was during the national hysteria over the Monica Lewinsky scandal), rushed its passage by a voice vote in 1998.

The second prong was to revamp the Copyright Act and toughen a piece of legislation that would halt the trade in digitized copyright material.