Righting Copywrongs | January 14, 2002 | James Surowiecki | The New Yorker

"Three years ago, the Walt Disney Company pulled off a nifty legal heist. Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse—who made his screen début in "Steamboat Willie," in 1928—was due to expire in 2003. The rights to Pluto, Goofy, and Donald Duck were to expire a few years later. This spelled trouble. But, after some aggressive lobbying and well-targeted campaign contributions from Disney and others, the threat was quashed: Congress quietly passed the so-called Sonny Bono Act, which extended all copyrights for twenty more years and kept Mickey out of the public domain.

At the time, Lawrence Lessig was a law professor at Harvard, where he'd earned a reputation as the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era. Lessig was so outraged by the Bono Act that he helped orchestrate a lawsuit—ultimately unsuccessful—challenging its constitutionality. Now Lessig has published a book, "The Future of Ideas," which serves as a bleak summa of his thoughts on intellectual property. For Lessig (who's now at Stanford), the Bono Act was not just another instance of fat-cat favoritism but part of a disastrous trend toward what might be called property-rights fundamentalism. In his view, this trend is threatening to destroy the Internet and plunge us into a cultural dark age...."