PHILADELPHIA- Joseph Turow and other academic researchers wonder if Walt Disney ever intended that the world of academia should be hamstrung by his company's desire to guard Mickey Mouse.  

"That is just what's happening," said Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication.  "Aggressive copyright laws, often tied to companies desire to protect intellectual property, are making the future of innovative scholarship precarious."

Turow and other researchers argue that entire generations of students aren't benefiting from cutting-edge ways to explore knowledge because corporate over-protection of Mickey Mouse and other copyrighted images has made distribution of even small portions of audio or visual material among their professors legal dynamite.

On June 18, about 170 university and college researchers will meet to discuss this growing problem.  Sponsored by Penn's Annenberg Public Policy Center and by Rice University, the conference, "Knowledge Held Hostage? Scholarly Versus Corporate Rights in the Digital World," will examine the meaning of "fair use" in scholarship.  

"According to the courts," Turow said, "a person can reproduce parts of creative material owned by someone else, particularly if it is done in ways that add new meaning to the material and protect the copyright owner's right to profit from the original."  

Scholars have found that, while this approach sounds reasonable, the only real way to be sure a particular use is legally "fair" is if the matter is taken up in federal court, Turow said, and researchers are frightened away by the cost of litigation when media organizations threaten to sue if parts of their movies, music and television shows are used in scholarly projects.

"Horror stories abound about researchers unable to create innovative work under the idea of fair use," he said.   

In Turow's case, he was commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to create an audiovisual essay about television images of physicians to be distributed on CD at no cost to first-year U.S. medical students.  

Warner Bros. gave permission to use a one-minute clip from "ER" and a clip from a 1940 Dr. Kildare movie.  The Screen Actors Guild gave clearance so that he would not have to pay the actors in the scenes.  

But, even though Turow work was a scholarly essay given free to medical students, other studios insisted that inserting one-minute clips from their own series into the CD was not fair use.  

Because the foundation didn't want to be sued, Turow was forced to spend six months and $17,000 getting copyright clearances for three additional one-minute clips.

"I had the money from the foundation to pay for the clips, but many other academics don't have the resources and aren't able to carry out projects like this," Turow said.

The first session of the June 18 Philadelphia conference is devoted to real problems that academics have faced when trying to use copyrighted material in their scholarship.

Other panels will explore ways that scholars might operate with and around copyright concerns.  One suggestion is to encourage creators of copyrighted materials to actively invite free non-commercial use of portions of their works for the good of society.  Another is to require "mandatory licensing" of small portions of copyrighted materials to academics for a reasonably small fee.   A third is to start a foundation-supported fair use protection society with attorneys who will help scholars determine if they have a good case for fair use and, if they do, stand up for them in court.

"There is an incredible amount of intellectual firepower here, said Turow, one of the conference organizers.  "Academics don't want to be stuck using only the printed page.  Our students and our scholarship deserve the best we can think and do."

The conference will be streamed on the Web June 18 beginning at 8:30 a.m. (EDT) from www.knowledgehostage.org.