Fiction Networks: The Emergence of Proprietary, Persistent, Large ...

entertainment industry will be composed of a limited number of global giants”
and that Time intended to be one of those companies. These firms needed to be
vertically integrated, large enough to produce, market, and distribute worldwide,
and able to amortize the costs of doing global business through as broad a
distribution network as possible. (Bettig 38)
This consolidation of media companies, as one might imagine, has a broad range of
political, social and economic implications. It also, however, has structural implications
for the stories these companies produce. Mass media companies create, among other
products, popular fictions: stories that involve imaginary elements marketed under a
corporate brand. Mass-media popular fictions reflect the market-oriented system and
climate that generates and manages them:
Herein lies the contradiction of capitalist media: to understand our mass media,
we must be able to understand them as always and simultaneously text and
commodity, intertext and product line. This contradiction is well captured in the
phrase “show business.” (Meehan 61-62)
The Bono Act thus reflects not only a growth of corporate control of intellectual property
– an increase in the ability of media companies to manage, persist, and develop content-
as-commodity over time – but also what one might consider a consequent structural
evolution, in a corporate context, of key intellectual properties, or fictions, themselves.
The longevity of copyrights retained by the Walt Disney Company both reflects and
reinforces a corresponding longevity in their characters – Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and
the rest – as active creative products. Disney has an interest not only in retaining existing
rights to old stories featuring their classic characters, but in retaining the right to produce
countless new stories. Mickey and Donald are characters (agents in a fiction) and brands
(agents in a market) at once, and the longevity and expansion of Disney as a global
company has a direct impact on the longevity and expansion of the fictions they sell.
While, in the case of Disney, this propagation is more one of visual iconographies
than stories – Mickey, when he appears within the context of a story at all, appears in
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