Mickey, Please Come Home
by Jamie Wilson

Who owns your CDs? How about your DVDs and videotapes?

If you bought them, they're yours, right? What about the Biz Markie disc you burned from a friend (because come on, you weren't really going to buy it). Or the copy of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom you recorded when it was on TV in 1987? Well ... they say possession is nine-tenths of the law, don't they?

Maybe, but to judge from the anxious voices coming from Hollywood and Washington, maybe not for long.

Many of us have the technology to make exact copies of music, movies and pretty much anything else we want, and the entertainment industry is lobbying intensely to lay down the law, or at least buy a little bit of favor from it. On a recent episode of PBS's "NOW with Bill Moyers," Jack Valenti, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, worried that "A 12-year-old, with the click of a mouse, can send a movie hurtling to all of the five continents. So, it's a kind of piracy, a kind of pilfering and theft ..." Though he never revealed which two continents are still OK to hurtle movies toward, Mr. Valenti's MPAA, along with other industry heavyweights led by the Disney Corp., have just won a major victory in the Supreme Court: By a 7-2 margin the court recently upheld the Copyright Extension Act of 1998 (sometimes called the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, after the bill's musician-turned-congressman sponsor), giving the entertainment industry unprecedented control over our cultural heritage.

This heritage includes such icons as Mickey Mouse and Superman, our pop-culture vocabulary ("a Mickey Mouse job") and many songs that have taken on a significance over the years, one that transcends record sales — the sounds, images, words and ideas that define, little bit by little bit, our national character. The idea is, or used to be, that an artist would retain the rights to her novel, for example, for her lifetime plus 50 years. This gave creative people a financial incentive to keep producing, an incentive necessary to the development of a literate, vibrant democracy. In Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers gave Congress the right to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries," establishing the modern notion of the copyright. It has generally been interpreted as allowing an artist or group to invent new material or adapt old material for new purposes and make money from their creation for a certain period of time. And the reason is obvious: A vibrant and dynamic people who exchange ideas freely will in turn consume and produce more art, art of a high quality even.

The right to own and sell copies of one's art in turn gave rise to the American entertainment and copyright industries, industries that today generate more export revenue than the agriculture, automobile and defense industries, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It also allowed people like the writers and animators at Disney to create a cultural legacy that has delighted countless people by turning ancient stories and fairytales like Cinderella and Aladdin into full-length animated features.

Unfortunately, Disney and others now hope to stretch the legal definition of the term, "Authors and Inventors" to include movie studios, record companies and book publishers — people who by and large don't author or invent anything. They do, however, finance creative projects. For that we are all very grateful — and they are all very rich. We also offer them the opportunity to recoup their investments at the box office, through movie rentals and retail sales of books, movies and music (of course, they don't always make all their money back but that's a risk of business).

The public, for its part, allows all of this to take place with the understanding that after a certain period of time the art will be returned to us and be available for use in the public domain, like the plays of Shakespeare or the Book of Genesis.

Or, we did, until this recent Supreme Court decision granted the entertainment industry exclusive rights to art they did not write, paint, film or play for 20 more years and left the door open for Congress to extend that right again and again, perhaps indefinitely.

Art needs to be protected, but free cultural exchange is undeniably good — good for art, good for artists, and ultimately, good for the entertainment industry (For example, the Grateful Dead allowed free taping of their concerts and encouraged fans to freely trade their tapes. At the same time, they also aggressively went after people who tried to market and sell bootlegged copies of their music — all of this while making huge fortunes for themselves and their record company). Access inspires creativity. Wilco gave its last album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, away for free on their website and it still sold more than anything else they have released to date. The entertainment industry has yet to figured this out and, by support legislation like the Copyright Extension Act, has only hurt the very creativity they claim to be protecting.

E-mail Jamie Wilson at jgreerw@hotmail.com.