As 2024 begins, Mickey Mouse no longer remains under the full legal control of the Walt Disney Company. Meanwhile, their archenemy vies with an ex-President, who has pictured himself as a slacker cartoon frog, for the Republican nomination.

Ron DeSantis’s thin cloak of anti-corporate rhetoric covers a conventional GOP suit. Donald Trump is known more from hosting network TV than for inspiring dank web memes. But while this year beggars belief from the viewpoint of this year, it would have been unimaginable a quarter-century ago.

The House of Representatives passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act on October 7, 1998, forestalling the copyright expirations of Mickey cartoons that would have started in 2004.  Less than two months since the introductions of Rotten Tomatoes and Google, Florida Representative Bill McCollum argued that copyright effectively “promotes the creation of educational materials, widens the dissemination of information and provides countless hours of entertainment.” It hadn’t become apparent how networked creation and dissemination would mushroom past guaranteed returns on investment; a week later, FanFiction.Net provided a venue for “countless hours of entertainment” from amateur writers.

Meanwhile, New York Representative Jerry Nadler cautioned that “government should intervene in the free market when there is a real public policy purpose only … when the free market is not working right” to question, not lengthy copyrights, but the partial exemption of restaurants from music licensing fees, despite them being government-granted monopolies in the first place and their retroactive extension a handout to owners of existing works.

Archivists and activists were heeded even less than restaurateurs, but the next month, A Bug’s Life anticipated their potential power. “You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up. Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one. And if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life!”

By 2011, the web-linked hive mind derailed the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act bills from following the Sonny Bono Act into enactment. Despite consolidation in the tech and media industries, nobody was truly in control, for better or worse.

Pepe the Frog creator Matt Furie told Esquire in 2016 of his doubts that “copyright laws have caught up to the wild west of the Internet” on which many “people can post Mickey Mouse on a blog and they’re not going to get a cease and desist from Disney.” Despite opposing the connotations that had tainted his amphibian since debuting on MySpace in 2005, “even if I did try to stop it, it’s like whack-a-mole” (itself a Mattel trademark colloquially decontextualized from the specific arcade game it originally denoted).

SOPA and PIPA couldn’t have driven crowds to early-2010s Disney turkeys like John Carter and The Lone Ranger. A decade later, Disney+’s financial losses — and its studio’s chances to revive its magic in the marketplace of ideas — don’t have much do with losing exclusives on one-reelers made during the Coolidge administration.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Schlosberg: Where do you want to take a free mouse today?” by Joel Schlosberg, Dover, Delaware State News, January 4, 2024
2. “Where Do You Want to Take a Free Mouse Today?” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, January 5, 2024
3. “Where do you want to take a free mouse today?” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], January 5, 2024

In late December, US Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) packed her carpet bag and moved her 2024 re-election campaign. After supposedly representing her state’s 3rd district for two terms, she’s now seeking to supposedly represent the 4th.

Why? Well, it’s all about safety.

Not her constituents’ safety, her district’s safety, her state’s safety, her party’s safety, or even her personal safety, but the safety of her career climbing the ladder of the American political class.

After eking out re-election by about 500 votes in 2022, she’s not sure she can do it again … at least not where she is. The Democratic opponent she barely beat last time is back for Round 2, this time with a lot more money, a lot more name recognition, and several more public embarrassments under Boebert’s belt to eat away at that tiny margin of victory.

Naturally, Boebert blames “dark money that is directed at destroying me personally,” rather than anything she’s done or failed to do, for her situation.

Meanwhile, fellow Republican Ken Buck has announced his retirement, after five terms, from a “safe GOP” seat that Donald Trump carried by 16 points in 2020.

Sure, there are Republicans who actually live in the 4th District and are interested in replacing Buck, but for Lauren Boebert it’s all about Lauren Boebert.

While the particulars of her move are unusual, the general idea isn’t. It’s often the case that budding politicians will “shop” for, then move to, the districts or states they consider most likely to help launch successful careers.

Then there’s former US Senator Joe Lieberman.

In 2006, Lieberman lost the Democratic primary in his quest for a third term supposedly representing Connecticut. In response, he launched a “third party” campaign and ended up winning the general election with a plurality.

His choice of party name was telling. Most politicians would have gone with “Lieberman for Connecticut,” but in a refreshing fit of honesty he chose “Connecticut for Lieberman,” thus tacitly confessing that, in his view, the state of Connecticut existed for the sole purpose of providing  him with a Senate seat for as long as he darn well felt like sitting in one.

Which is pretty much what Boebert’s telling Coloradoans with her own House district move. And it just may work. Not for them, necessarily, but for her.

These people don’t work for you. They work for themselves. You’re just there to fund their paychecks and benefits. Don’t forget that.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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As 2023 ends and 2024 begins, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank billions of you, in America and around the world, for your service.

No, I’m not talking to military veterans — or at least not to military veterans AS military veterans. Whenever I’m thanked for my “service” in the US Marine Corps, my first instinct and usual course of action is to point out two things:

First, the rest of you paid me good money and provided me with food, housing, medical care, exotic travel, and other benefits.

Secondly, my “service” wasn’t to you, nor was it to some high-minded concept like, say, freedom. It was to a government which forcibly extracted that pay and those bennies from Americans’ wallets whether they liked it or not, then endangered the lives and livelihoods of Americans and others alike by using me and millions like me, sending us around the world conducting ourselves violently in pursuit of unworthy goals.

War is an evil, not a good. Those who engage in it are, at our very BEST, the unwitting (or if conscripted, unwilling) pawns of evil actors, and at worst know full well what we’re doing and for whom, yet actively choose to do it anyway.

You don’t owe veterans thanks for our “service.” We owe YOU our sincere apologies and such restitution as we can figure out how to make for the damage we’ve done.

Of course, many veterans go on later to engage in service that’s truly worthy of thanks.

Waiting tables. Growing crops. Building houses. Writing software. Entertaining audiences. Treating the ill and injured. Putting out fires. Repairing or operating planes, trains, trucks, cars, bicycles, etc. Mopping floors. Cleaning toilets or making sure water gets to and from them correctly.

The list of good  and important things that people do goes on and on.

The vast majority of humans spend much of our time making other humans’ lives better, and having our own lives made better by those other humans.

I’m not sure we thank each other (including military veterans who’ve moved on from destructive to productive work) enough, or sincerely enough, for all we do.

But I’m sure we should.

My New Year’s resolution is to be more mindful of my debt to all those who, by way of earning their own livings, improve my life.

Thank YOU for YOUR service. I wish you a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2024.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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