62-year-old Sonny Bono of Sonny And Cher was killed when he hit a tree while skiing on the Nevada side of Heavenly Ski Resort near South Lake Tahoe, California. The duo placed eleven songs on the Billboard Top 40 between 1965 and 1972 before divorcing in 1975. After leaving show business, Sonny was voted in as Mayor of Palm Springs, California in 1988 and in 1994 was elected to the US congress, and re-elected in 1996.
Sonny worked a lot on the “‘Sonny Bono’ Copyright Term Extension Act” (“CTEA” for short) back when it was still just a bill (“♫ yes I’m only a bill ♫”), but died unexpectedly before he was able to actually introduce it in congress. His widow, Mary, ran for an won his place in the Senate and introduced the bill in 1998 less than nine months after Sonny’s death and it was signed into law shortly thereafter. That law is why the copyrights expired in the U.S. on Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Bambie, and others in 2024 rather than 2004 and the copyrights expired on Popeye and other works just 4 days ago rather than in 2005.
As you might imagine, companies like Disney and organizations like the MPAA lobbied heavily to get the law passed. Its detractors even referred to it as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” just to drive home how much it catered to the special interests of big entertainment at the expense of everyone else.
The law’s constitutionality was challenged shortly after it was signed into law in a court case called Eldred v. Ashcroft. The CTEA wasn’t the first law that extended copyrights on existing works and one of the arguments of the plaintiffs was that making “forever” copyrights wasn’t allowed by the Constitution, so Congress’s practice for a couple of decades of extending copyrights on existing works just before they expired was overstepping the authority Congress was granted in the constitution. In fact, Mary Bono had at one point after the CTEA passed made a comment in a speech to the Senate advocating specifically that Congress continue to extend copyright every time the expiration date started to approach in order specifically to keep the copyright alive on things forever, or as Mary creatively put it, “forever less one day”. This was a plan she attributed to then-president-of-the-MPAA Jack Valenti.
Unfortunately (IMO), in a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice Ginsberg, the Supreme Court found the CTEA was in fact constitutional. And that kept a lot of important works locked up and under copyright for 20 years longer than they would have been had the CTEA never passed. At least the “forever less one day” apparently hasn’t continued. And as for Disney, they’ve resorted to trying to secure trademark protections on Steamboat Willie (the first work in which Mickey Mouse appeared) since they no longer hold a copyright on that work.