toons in copyrightland

If you've been visiting the Eldred v. Ashcroft web site, you've noticed that they have been regularly adding links to articles about the battle against the Bono Copyright Extension Act. If you haven't, there's some interesting commentary coming out on the litigation from a broad spectrum of the population. The latest addition is an article from Animation World which came out back in April, and discusses how the courtroom drama might affect toondom.

Speaking of toondom, I was exploring Donald D. Markstein's Toonpedia, which bills itself as "a vast repository of toonological knowledge." It definitely is. It surveys some of the early days of animation. While I thought that his page on Mickey was pretty good, I also discovered that before Mickey, there was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and before Oswald came Felix the Cat. In addition to the Toonpedia site, I also came across a page on Ub Iwerks, who was one of Walt Disney's closest friends and a collaborator on a number of characters, including Mickey Mouse.