A whole new Aladdin is in movie theaters. We went to see it last week. It has some amazing Bollywood-style dance scenes, a resplendent palace and the best magic carpet rides over Agrabah that money (and Industrial Light & Magic) can provide. At about 56% approval, Rotten Tomatoes didn't love it, but we enjoyed it, maybe because we were watching it with one eye on the dancing and one eye on economics, intellectual property rights and history.
In all, it cost $183 million to make. And, partly thanks to Disney's lobbying efforts, the Disney corporation will control the rights to this film for 95 years. That's because Disney has long been a major political force in the fight to lengthen copyright. In past decades, Congress has approved copyright extensions just when the copyright to Mickey Mouse was about to expire. The 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act is pejoratively nicknamed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
As Disney will argue, you don't want intellectual property law to be too permissive or there will be little incentive to create new music or movies. But, when copyright is too broad and strong, the consumer loses out. Great stories and characters can't enter the public domain, which makes it harder to riff on old ideas. Like many of Disney's products, Aladdin itself is a remix of an old story, one well out of reach of modern copyright laws.
These are the kinds of arguments that cropped up last year when Congress considered the Music Modernization Act. Also, when the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement was negotiated, persuading other countries to adopt American copyright law of life of the creator plus 70 years was a sticking point in negotiations.
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