Copyright and Disney

As I began to read the article Mickey Mouse vs. The People I found out a lot about the legal system with copyright. Eric Eldred and Laura Bjorklund just wanted to publish old books. Eldred had a web site that contained versions of old Nathaniel Hawthorne novels and Robert Frost poems since 1995. Bjorklund was a small Massachusetts publishing company that focused on genealogy texts and out-of-print histories. On October 27, 1998 a Disney Corp. urged President Clinton that their Mickey Mouse copyright was soon to expire. Clinton then passed a law that allowed a copyright protection to extend for another 20 years. Eldred and Bjorklund said that the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act (the law that President Clinton passed) was harming the public by taking information from public domains and agreeing to allow the copyright holders to have full control. "Corporations would benefit, but small publishers and the general public, they argued, would suffer." A law professor from Harvard had heard their case and accepted it pro bono. Both Eldred and Bjorklund was the first plaintiff’s in a law suit that was trying to overturn the copyright extension. After four years of litigation, the Supreme Court said that they would hear their case on February 19, 2002. The copyright law that was passed in 1978 stating that an author’s work would be protected for 50 years after they passed away. Corporations such as Mickey Mouse were protected for an extended 20 years after The Bono Act.

Since I am wanting to major in pre-law this story is really appealing to me because it is surprising that the United States Supreme Court actually accepted the case. People that send cases to the Supreme Court are denied more than accepted.