(FORTUNE Magazine) – In the waning days of the last election, President Clinton often disparaged the Republicans' "do nothing" Congress, pointing to its failure to pass anti-tobacco legislation or a plan to save Social Security. But that obscures the full picture: If nothing else, Congress made the world safe for Mickey Mouse.

You may not even have known Mickey was in danger. But he and his buddies were facing the frightening prospect of sliding into the public domain, where they could have been besmirched by anyone with an airbrush. Uncle Walt raised his little menagerie over the '20s and '30s, securing a 75-year copyright for each character as it came into the world, but their expiration dates were looming--Mickey's in 2003, Pluto's in 2005, Goofy's in 2007, and Donald Duck's in 2009. Facing the loss of its icons, Disney spearheaded a lobbying campaign to extend the limits of all U.S. copyrights. And sure enough, one of the 105th Congress' last acts was to pass the Copyright Term Extension Act, which tacked 20 more years of serfdom onto the life spans of Mickey and friends. Other soon-to-expire copyrights on such classics as The Great Gatsby and the movie Gone With the Wind were also extended.

In leading the charge to change the law, Disney mustered a combination of two of Washington's favorite commodities: stardust and cash. The stardust came from sources like Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti, who wooed legislators with face-to-face lobbying, free screenings of movies, and even a personal plea from King Kong's Fay Wray. As for the cash, the same day Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) became a co-sponsor of the bill, he received a $1,000 campaign contribution from Disney's PAC. Ten of the 13 initial sponsors of the legislation in the House received contributions from Disney, including $5,000 apiece to Representatives Howard Coble (R-N.C.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.), senior members of the Judiciary Committee. And the same PAC gave $20,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Coble notes that there were fine legal reasons for passing the bill; for one, it aligns U.S. copyrights with Europe's, since the E.U. extended its copyrights by 20 years in 1995. "It gives our intellectual property a fair shake in the rest of the world," he says. "It's a win-win proposal for America." Except, perhaps, for those entrepreneurs who were waiting for the copyrights to expire, hoping to one day sell Mickey Mousetraps and Donald Duck Sauce.

--Jonathan P. Decker