It finally happened: after almost a century, Mickey Mouse was freed from the leash of Disney copyrights. The first versions of the iconic cartoon character, seen in Willie the steamboat and a silent version of crazy planewill enter the public domain in the US on January 1, 2024. (Thankfully, an older version of Minnie Mouse is also included.) There's still a complicated mess of protections surrounding Mickey, but today is a moment that public domain advocates have been waiting for decades: and there are plenty of other interesting new entries, too.
The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School, as usual, has a summary of notable works whose copyright protections expire today in the U.S. The list includes sound recordings from 1923 and works in other media that were published in 1928. Among other things, it covers:
You can find a large number of public domain sound recordings for download at the Library of Congress National Jukebox. And if you are inspired by the media mentioned above or any other work entering the public domain this year, Techdirt will be the host its sixth annual Public Domain Game Jam to celebrate the creation of games based on them.
For current characters like Mickey Mouse, of course, copyright law is particularly complicated. The public domain version of the character does not include significant design changes made in later works, such as Mickey's The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Fancy in 1940. And you cannot produce a work that is falsely represented as a Disney production or a piece of official merchandise, since Mickey Mouse is also a registered trademark of Disney. The director of the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Jennifer Jenkins, has a much more complete explanation of the law on Duke's blog.
The public domain is supposed to be the final destination of any copyrighted work; It is part of a commitment that recognizes the benefits of allowing artists and thinkers to control and profit from their work in the short term, while freely building on the ideas of others in the long term. , a balance that Disney itself relied on when making adaptations of fairy tales like snow White and Cinderella. (It is also a vital factor in allowing archivists to preserve old media after their creators die or can no longer be found, as it allows copies to be made without legal concerns, and only a small portion of works protected by copyright They remain commercially valuable throughout the protection period. ) But it was frozen for 20 years in the US thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which was derisively dubbed the “Protection Act.” “Mickey Mouse” by to delay Willie the steamboat's entry into the public domain. Although despite the nickname, Disney was far from the only company pushing for its approval.
The result is that Mickey Mouse has become a symbol of expanded copyright protection and (with varying degrees of fairness) of Disney's involvement in intellectual property law. When Disney angered Republican politicians by criticizing Florida's “Don't Say Gay” law, for example, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) proposed reversing the quasi-nuclear intellectual property law in the name of strip “woke corporations like Disney of special copyright protections.” We may see legal fights over the precise boundaries of Mickey's public domain, in the same way we have other characters like Sherlock Holmes, but today is a good day to think about new uses for old media.
