ASU law professor comments on copyright extension

Professor Dennis Karjala, a Faculty Fellow for the Center for Law, Science and Innovation, was recently quoted in the Washington Post in a story about copyright extension.

The article, “15 years ago, Congress kept Mickey Mouse out of the public domain. Will they do it again?” describes how the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended copyright protection, including everything from Disney’s famous mouse to Superman, for another 20 years, and how such companies have a strong incentive to look for new ways to extend the protection when the act expires.

Critics of the act include Karjala, who says he believes the act serves very few people.

"There was not a single argument that actually can stand up to any kind of reasonable analysis," Karjala said. "Basically the Gershwin family trust, grandchildren of Oscar Hammerstein, Disney, others of that ilk."

To read the full article, click here.

Karjala was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, a Fulbright Teaching Fellow at the University of Hokkaido and a Japan Foundation Fellow at the University of Tokyo. He has held visiting professorships at numerous institutions, including the University of Minnesota Law School, Washington University School of Law and UCLA School of Law. He also practiced law at the firm of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen in San Francisco.