His solution is to reverse copyright protections for Disney after it came out against Florida’s parental rights law, dubbed the “don’t say gay” law by opponents.
In this and other instances, Hawley and others on the right are seizing on long-raging wonkish policy debates and weaponizing them as retribution against companies for going “woke.”
One of Hawley’s arguments — that Disney and other companies have been granted special favors — is actually rooted in what went down in 1998: The Mouse House, along with other companies, lobbied heavily for extending the terms of copyrights by 20 years.
At the time, the copyright on Steamboat Willie, the first film appearance of Mickey Mouse, was facing expiration, and Disney’s push for the extension became so notorious that the legislation came to be known by detractors as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” Instead of losing protections for the corporate mascot in 2003, they were able to kick the can to 2023.
1928’s “Steamboat Willie” EverettHawley argues that the lengthy copyright term is giving Disney a “stranglehold” on its intellectual property. On that front, he will have some agreement among public interest groups, including those on the left, which have long argued that the framers of the Constitution never intended copyright terms to last so long.
Hawley’s bill, though, is written in such a way to make it apply almost exclusively to Disney, as if the company was the sole beneficiary of the copyright extension. The 1998 legislation applied to all works, from George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
Even groups that have been at odds with the studios over copyright issues found Hawley’s proposal a bit absurd. John Bergmayer, legal director at public interest group Public Knowledge, said that “while I agree that copyright terms should be shorter, Public Knowledge does not ‘support’ such an unserious bill, particularly one that is plainly motivated by a desire to punish a company for political (and unconstitutional) reasons.”
Take another of Hawley’s examples: China.
He chides Hollywood for having “pander” to Beijing censors to gain access to the marketplace for the movies.
He’s not wrong. There is a long history and a slew of examples where that is the case, sometimes to the point of embarrassment and ridicule. Through the years the industry itself has had little official to say about it, other than it’s long been a practice across the world to edit movies to conform to local tastes.
Perhaps no policy point has gotten more recent attention than Section 230. That’s the provision of a 1996 law that gives tech companies immunity for the way that they moderate third-party content.
Hawley is among a chorus of voices on the right who want Section 230 reformed or repealed in response to alleged Facebook and Twitter bias against conservative viewpoints. That policy desire crosses partisan lines, as some Democrats, including President Joe Biden, also want to see Section 230 reforms, albeit for different reasons.
Curiously, though, there is a social media platform, created in response to alleged platform bias, that embraces the protections of Section 230: Truth Social, Donald Trump’s start up. Its terms of service includes a host of content moderation policies, including the right to remove posts that are “false, inaccurate or misleading,” and another to prohibit content that is obscene, lewd posts or “otherwise objectionable.”
There’s also a lot of selectivity in which companies are deemed supportive of American values and which are not. Murdoch’s companies benefited from special FCC waivers and media ownership carve-outs. Fox Corp., meanwhile, provides benefits to employees for gender reassignment surgeries. Does that make Fox Corp. “woke”? Hawley’s office did not respond to a request for comment on his definition of the term.