Mickey Mouse Protection Act
- noun
- Offensive
:
[ofensivo] nombre despectivo de la Ley de Extensión del Plazo de los Derechos de Autor de EE. UU.
- Artists have debated whether the Mickey Mouse Protection Act stifles creativity or protects intellectual property.
Examples
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The Mickey Mouse Protection Act extended copyright terms by 20 years in the United States.
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Many legal scholars criticized the Mickey Mouse Protection Act for favoring big corporations.
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Many critics argue that the Mickey Mouse Protection Act harms creativity.
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The Mickey Mouse Protection Act was enacted to extend copyright terms.
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Many legal experts view the Mickey Mouse Protection Act as a law that primarily benefits major companies like Disney.
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Critics claim that the Mickey Mouse Protection Act creates an unfair advantage for large media corporations over independent creators.
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The controversial Mickey Mouse Protection Act is often seen as a way to prolong the control of famous characters by their owners.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Mickey + Mouse + protection + act
Although 'protection' + 'act' transparently signals a law that protects something, the modifier 'Mickey Mouse' is a culture-specific, derogatory reference to Disney and copyright-extension politics that a B1 learner who only knows the individual words would not infer. The intended meaning (a nickname for copyright-term extension favoring large media companies) requires background knowledge about Mickey Mouse/Disney and copyright lobbying, so the overall expression is not derivable from its parts.
Etymology
Mickey Mouse Protection Act comes from the idea that the law gave extra time to the copyright on Disney's famous character Mickey Mouse, stopping him from becoming 'free for anyone to use'. So people used this nickname to say the law 'protected' big companies like Disney rather than the public.
