Michael Eisner Needs a History Lesson

Michael Eisner gave an interview at SXSW on Tuesday and at one point he was asked about copyright issues. He responded with a strongly pro-copyright statement:

“I have a long history, obviously, of believing in copyright. I think basically what separated this country from the rest of the world was patents and copyrights. President Lincoln introduced a lot of this, fought for (the idea that) to pay people for their intellectual work was no different than paying them for their physical work. And nobody would think twice about paying someone for their physical work.”

Eisner has been repeating this bizarre and near totally incorrect claim about Lincoln for years. In fact, in 2002 he wrote an editorial for the Financial Times with the bizarre claim that Abraham Lincoln would hate file sharing. Then, last year, in another interview he talked about how important intellectual property was in the U.S. since the time of Lincoln. It certainly would appear that he has Lincoln on the brain when it comes to intellectual property. There are just a few problems with this, with the first one being that Lincoln had almost nothing to do with intellectual property laws in this country.

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