“The only thing wrong that I saw when I held Barbie,” Alex Kozinski, then the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who presided over Mattel v. MGA, said, joking, “is when I lift her skirt there is nothing underneath.”
Corporate ownership of ideas, the dramatic extension of the terms of copyright, and a wild expansion of what counts as protectable intellectual property have together undermined the original purpose of intellectual-property law. Nine out of ten patents granted in the United States are now owned by corporations. Congress passed ten copyright-extension acts in the course of the twentieth century; copyright now lasts for seventy years after the death of the author. Corporations have attempted to claim exclusive legal rights to everything from yoga moves to genetic sequences.