Copyright

I will admit that at first, i really did not know much about copyright, the rules, or even exactly what it meant. I know that i see the copyright symbol on books and logos and it meant they could not be copied, but any knowledge more extensive than that was lost to me.

Today, however, I learned many things about copyright. I learned when the first copyright law was passed (1760), I learned about the Fair Use policy, I learned about different acts passed in relation to copyright laws, and I learned about the legal consequences of violating copyright laws.

One of the acts i learned about was called the Sonny Bono Act, or the Mickey Mouse Act. This act was passed when the copyright that Disney had for their Mickey Mouse character was about to expire. If this had happened, Disney would have lost a lot of money, so they passed an act that extended copyright for 20 more years. Of course, this affected many things with copyright and the extension of these copyrights caused a lot of issues. The public was not ready for this Act at the time, but now that Disney's copyright is almost up, it seems almost inevitable that they will try and pass another act extending their copyright.

I think an extension of their copyright is fine, as long as they limit it to just their Disney products. I think it is wrong the extend non-related copyrights just so Disney can reap more money. That is not fair, but this time I think the public will be ready for this controversy, and the same thing hopefully will not happen twice! To summarize this controversy, the 2 sides are that Disney will try and extend their copyright and in doing so, they will extend the copyright of a huge number of other unrelated works which will create problems. The other side is that it is fine for Disney to affect their own products but that that is all they should have power over and that that mistake will not be made again. I agree with the second argument.