Mickey Mouse v. The Air Pirates

Writing in the Boston Globe's great Ideas section, Jeet Heer recaps one of the most interesting of all copyright battles:

In the 1970s, the underground cartoonist Dan O'Neill risked a life-destroying lawsuit and jail time when he published a series of raunchy Mickey-taunting comics. Along the way, O'Neill recruited scores of followers into two of the wackiest groups to emerge from the counterculture of the 1970s: the Air Pirates and the Mouse Liberation Front.

Whole thing here.

Read Jesse Walker's great interview with the rat himself, on the occasion of this year's Supreme Court ruling in Eldred v. Ashcroft, the case that unsuccessfully sought to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.