Absorbing profile of Larry Lessig and his challenge to the copyright extension of 1998 in the LA Times mag
- But Lessig doesn't merely want to free the past. He wants to free the future as well. That's something else that the entertainment companies want to lock up. The laws they are proposing and the technologies they are developing, he says, will make creativity on the Internet a wholly owned subsidiary of the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the Motion Picture Assn. of America.
His immediate target is a 1998 law that extended copyright protection an additional 20 years. It was a measure so obscure that the Senate passed it unanimously, with no debate and little public discussion. But it so outraged Lessig that he mounted what has become the first constitutional challenge of copyright limits to ever reach the Supreme Court. On Oct. 9, the former Supreme Court law clerk will try to persuade the justices to end private ownership of hundreds of thousands of artistic works, including some of America's most cherished. If he gets the court to agree, both the past and the future will change.
''The world won't end,'' he says. ''Hollywood will just have to find a different way to make money.''
During the past three years, as his copyright lawsuit has wended its way through the courts, Lessig has been talking it up in forums around the country and Europe. Walt Disney, he is always careful to say, is his hero.
Disney, one of the most popular artists of the 20th century, knew what a bountiful resource the past could be. He refashioned the Brothers Grimm's dark fairy tale "Snow White" into an upbeat charmer. He took Perrault's "Cinderella" and made it an enduring fable of pluckiness. "Alice in Wonderland," "The Jungle Book," "Pinocchio," "The Three Little Pigs," "Treasure Island" were all adapted from classics and became classics themselves.
What outrages Lessig is that Disney and other entertainment companies don't want this process repeated with their own works. They want very much to continue earning money by keeping their copyrights forever. Toward that end, Congress has extended copyright 11 times in the past 40 years, effectively locking away everything that Disney and every other entertainment company have ever produced.
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