Mickey Mouse, Long a Symbol in Copyright Wars, to Enter Public Domain: ‘It’s Finally Happening’; Variety, December 22, 2023

Gene Maddaus, Variety; Mickey Mouse, Long a Symbol in Copyright Wars, to Enter Public Domain: ‘It’s Finally Happening’

"Every Jan. 1, Jenkins celebrates Public Domain Day, publishing a long list of works that are now free for artists to remix and reimagine. This year’s list includes Tigger, who, like Mickey Mouse, made his first appearance in 1928. Other 1928 works include “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Buster Keaton’s “The Cameraman.” 

The celebrations are relatively recent. After Congress extended copyright terms in 1998, 20 years went by when nothing entered the public domain. Works began to lose copyright protection again in 2019, and since then, it’s been open season on “The Great Gatsby,” “Rhapsody in Blue” and Winnie the Pooh...

Lessig fought the extension all the way to the Supreme Court. He argued that Congress might keep granting extensions, thwarting the constitutional mandate that copyrights be “for limited times.” He lost, 7-2, but the debate helped advance the movement for Creative Commons and an appreciation for the benefits of “remix culture.”

“That movement awoke people to the essential need for balance in this,” Lessig said. “At the beginning of this fight, it was a simple battle between the pirates and the property owners. And by the end of that period, people recognized that there’s a much wider range of interests that were involved here, like education and access to knowledge.”...

He continues to support reforms that would free up a vast body of cultural output that remains inaccessible because it lacks commercial value and its ownership cannot be determined."

Big Tech funds the very people who are supposed to hold it accountable; The Washington Post, December 7, 2023

Joseph Menn

 and 

Naomi Nix

, The Washington Post; Big Tech funds the very people who are supposed to hold it accountable

"“Big Tech has played this game really successfully in the past decade,” said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor who previously founded Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society without raising money outside the university. “The number of academics who have been paid by Facebook alone is extraordinary.”

Most tech-focused academics say their work is not influenced by the companies, and the journals that publish their studies have ethics rules designed to ward off egregious interference. But in interviews, two dozen professors said that by controlling funding and access to data, tech companies wield “soft power,” slowing down research, sparking tension between academics and their institutions, and shifting the fields’ targets in small — but potentially transformative — ways...

Harvard’s Lessig, who spent years heading a center on ethics issues in society at the university, is developing a system for academics to verify that their research is truly independent. He hopes to present the initiative, the Academic Integrity Project, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is still looking for funding."

Manhattan teen cartoonist prompts review of Scholastic awards’ copyright rules; amNewYork, March 5, 2018

Nicole Brown, amNewYork; Manhattan teen cartoonist prompts review of Scholastic awards’ copyright rules

"“How come the @Scholastic @artandwriting award requires kids to sign over ‘irrevocable copyright’ if they win?! And why is it hidden in the ‘Terms & Conditions’ link that no one reads? Is it weird that I think that’s wrong?” [Sasha Matthews] wrote in December...

...[T]he ability to display the work could be granted through a license, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig said.

“Once you enter into a license to promote the work, you have all the permissions you need,” he told amNewYork. “That’s exactly what they could have done here, but rather than entering a license, they just grabbed the copyright.”

Matthews wrote about the copyright issue for a school assignment and got it published in February on the blog Boing Boing."