The financial page; righting copywrongs.(questionable renewing of the Mickey Mouse copyright)(The Talk of the Town)

Three years ago, the Walt Disney Company pulled off a nifty legal heist. Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse -- who made his screen debut 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.

Property rights, most Americans will agree, are a good thing. They give people an incentive to work and produce, by allowing them to reap the benefits of their own labor and creativity. But though the Framers treated property rights as essential, they did not view them as absolute. In particular, they drew a sharp distinction between physical property and intellectual property. If you own a house, it's yours until you sell it. But if you have a neat idea, or write a fine book, it's yours for only a limited period, after which it enters the public domain, where everyone can have free and equal access to it. Theoretically, a copyright should last just long enough to give people an incentive to create and innovate.

In the past forty years, though, we've somehow lost sight of the notion that a copyright should be temporary. The distinction between real property and intellectual property -- between things and ideas -- has been blurred. Since 1960, copyrights have been extended eleven times; they can now, in some cases, last well beyond a hundred years (the life of the artist plus seventy years). As Lessig remarks, it seems as if every time Mickey is in danger of entering the public domain copyright terms get longer.

Think about it. If current copyright law had been in effect a hundred years ago, the U.S. government might have had to pay royalties to use the image of Uncle Sam, and so would anyone who wanted to depict a jolly red-suited Santa Claus. (Both were created by the cartoonist Thomas Nast, who died in 1902.) The consequences of broader ...