{"id":251700,"date":"2022-04-02T07:13:34","date_gmt":"2022-04-02T07:13:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=251700"},"modified":"2022-04-03T10:58:12","modified_gmt":"2022-04-03T10:58:12","slug":"drain-the-disney-copyright-swamp-and-make-the-public-domain-great-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=251700","title":{"rendered":"Drain the Disney Copyright Swamp and Make the Public Domain Great Again"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>By E.C. Knight &#8212; Revolver May 21, 2022\u00a0<\/strong><\/h1>\n<p>\u201cDisney makes its money on Middle Americans who go to their theme parks, who buy their content and those people should know this corporation hates you,\u201d the Manhattan Institute\u2019s Christopher Rufo told Tucker Carlson recently. \u201cIt hates your culture, and it hates the color of your skin.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Tucker Carlson &amp; <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/realchrisrufo?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@realchrisrufo<\/a> Discussing Disney&#39;s Embrace Of Wokeness &amp; Documents Obtained By Chris Rufo Showing Disney&#39;s Anti-American &amp; Anti-White Training Sessions For Employees<\/p>\n<p>Chris: &quot;This corporation hates you, it hates your culture, and it hates the color of your skin.&quot; <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/fYRRT2hxE9\">pic.twitter.com\/fYRRT2hxE9<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; The Columbia Bugle \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 (@ColumbiaBugle) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ColumbiaBugle\/status\/1390843143143124998?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">May 8, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Disney laid off tens of thousands of workers due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As <a href=\"https:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/racial-politics-at-disney\">Rufo\u2019s reporting exposed<\/a>, despite those financial headwinds, the company still found a way to roll out a corporate diversity, inclusion, and equity program (commonly known by the acronym DEI, but deserving of the Freudian descriptor DIE, the fate reserved for the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.urbandictionary.com\/define.php?term=based\">based<\/a> in these programs, and straight white males in particular) featuring a Two Minutes Hate against white people and other race-and-sex-shaming content.<\/p>\n<p>Disney\u2019s new DIE program is not the first time the House of Mouse violated Middle America\u2019s conscience. In 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant Christian denomination in the United States, called for a boycott of Disney. At the time, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/US\/9706\/18\/baptists.disney\/\">CNN reported<\/a> the Convention\u2019s objections \u201cto Disney\u2019s policy of giving health benefits to same-sex partners of employees, \u2018Gay Days\u2019 at theme parks, and the release by Disney and its subsidiaries of controversial books and films like \u2018Pulp Fiction\u2019 and \u2018Kids.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Like many of the cultural right\u2019s other projects over the years, the boycott failed at every level. Thankfully, to use Benjamin Franklin\u2019s words, \u201cGod governs in the affairs of men.\u201d Providentially, a GOP-controlled Congress\u2019 previous coddling of Disney presents America First Republicans with a timely opportunity.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Mickey Mouse Goes to Washington<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>What comes to mind when you see the term \u201ccopyright law\u201d? Maybe the blue FBI warning screen accompanying an old VHS cassette or perhaps the ill-fated file sharing service Napster and its similarly-doomed cousin Grokster. Probably not a cultural battlefield.<\/p>\n<p>Copyright law predates the Founding. The Constitution grants Congress the power to \u201cpromote the Progress of Science\u201d\u2014 i.e., knowledge \u2014 by giving authors \u201cexclusive rights\u201d with respect to their protected content, including articles, books, and music. Subject to the fair use defense, modern copyright law gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to reproduce, make derivative works of, and publicly perform the copyrighted content. Once copyright expires, the work passes into the public domain where the public can copy at will.<\/p>\n<p>As the year 2000 approached, Disney had a problem. Copyrights on some of the company\u2019s earliest cartoons, including \u201cSteamboat Willie,\u201d were set to expire soon. As one <a href=\"http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/ALLPOLITICS\/1998\/08\/10\/cq\/disney.html\">1998 report put it<\/a>, \u201c[w]ithout copyright term extension, the company faces the potential nightmare of seeing its greatest treasures pass from corporate possession into the public domain.\u201d Americans would be free to reproduce Disney\u2019s public domain works, and even make new stories derived out of that content, without worrying about getting sued for copyright infringement. With \u201cbillions of dollars in revenue\u201d at stake the report adds, Mickey Mouse went to Washington.<\/p>\n<p>The story of how the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, known within the copyright bar as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, came to be is pure Swamp. In 1998, Disney Chairman Michael Eisner descended on Trent Lott\u2019s office to ask the Senate Majority Leader for help. \u201cHe was very much interested in seeing the copyright bill,\u201d Lott said at the time. As Congressional Quarterly reported, \u201c[b]efore he left the spacious offices of the majority leader at the U.S. Capitol on June 9, Eisner was assured that his company\u2019s pet bill would get the help it needed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In addition to Eisner\u2019s visit, the company donated money to key committee leaders, including Republican Congressman Howard Coble of North Carolina, who was then the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Arts and Intellectual Property. Disney also \u201cpaid $2,700\u201d to host House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his wife \u201cfor three days at Disney Institute, the company\u2019s educational facility in Orlando.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When it was all over, Mickey Mouse had his way with the Republican-controlled Congress. With unanimous consent in the Senate and a voice vote in the House, Congress enacted the extension, tacking an additional twenty years onto existing copyright terms.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>MAGA to Disney: Take a Hike<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Fast forward to today. The extension Disney toiled for on Capitol Hill in 1998 is about to run out. As early as 2024, key Disney cartoons will pass into the public domain.\u00a0 When the company came to Congress in 1998, it struck a decidedly neutral tone, however false those pretenses might have been at the time.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMickey Mouse is not a Republican or a Democrat,\u201d a former Disney lobbyist once said. What Rufo\u2019s reporting on Disney\u2019s DIE program shows is that, if that were ever true in the first place, it is no longer the case. Now Mickey is a cartoon Gramsci and Adorno, an open critical theorist. MAGA Republicans must resist Disney\u2019s inevitable call to further extend its copyright control over this entertainment from a bygone America.<\/p>\n<p>Such opposition will no doubt roil Disney. Good. Disney is ashamed of much of this content anyway. The company <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice\/2020\/10\/16\/924540535\/disney-warns-viewers-of-racism-in-some-classic-movies-with-strengthened-label\">now adorns<\/a> old movies with warnings about \u201cnegative depictions and\/or mistreatment of people or cultures.\u201d Disney moralizes its audience in these warnings, informing them that \u201c[t]hese stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.\u201d Wait a second.\u00a0 What\u2019s this about moral truth for all time? It\u2019s evidence of what <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theamericanconservative.com\/articles\/the-left-has-gone-far-beyond-relativism\/\">Paul Gottfried has observed<\/a> about the left in general: the woke aren\u2019t \u201crelativist\u201d in any meaningful sense, rather they are about the business of tearing down anyone and anything that gets in their way.<\/p>\n<p>Disney wants us to \u201clearn from\u201d this old content and \u201cspark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.\u201d If Disney wants \u201cconversation,\u201d there is no better way to do that than to get these works into the public domain, so Americans can freely engage with, modify, and improve upon them.<\/p>\n<p>As with its DIE program, Disney is not really interested in conversation so much as it is controlling the terms of debate. The company used copyright law to bankrupt a service called VidAngel, which allowed families to stream censored, curated versions of Disney content. For its part, the useless Beltway Right, in the form of the American Conservative Union, lent its support of Disney, urging in a blog post now removed from ACU\u2019s site, that the streaming service \u201coperates in violation of the Ten Commandments: Thou Shalt Not Steal.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>One can already hear the handwringing over not giving Disney what it wants. For its part, the modern iteration of the Southern Baptist Convention is unlikely to pose any opposition to Disney\u2019s woke agenda. Nowadays, Southern Baptist Convention President JD Greear says \u201cGod has not called us to save America.\u201d (Let not your heart be troubled, Pastor Greear, who closed his church\u2019s doors during the COVID-19 pandemic, apparently did hear the Lord calling him to <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jdgreear\/status\/1270063580549873664?lang=en\">encourage his flock<\/a> to take to the streets in the aftermath of George Floyd\u2019s death last summer.)<\/p>\n<p>To self-identified evangelical and Never Trump conservative David French, Disney\u2019s Marvel franchise, especially <em>Avengers: Endgame,<\/em> is not just entertainment, the films are one of the things French <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/magazine\/2019\/09\/09\/why-i-love-superhero-movies\/#slide-1\">loves most about America<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.revolver.news\/2021\/05\/make-disney-great-again-drain-the-copyright-swamp\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If he were alive today Walt Disney would be aghast at what his company has become. Its latest in house program is for diversity, inclusion and equity, appropriately known by its acronym DIE. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":251703,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-The_Media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=251700"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":251701,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251700\/revisions\/251701"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/251703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=251700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=251700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=251700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}