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It\u2019s finally happened: after nearly a century, Mickey Mouse has slipped off Disney\u2019s copyright leash. The first versions of the iconic cartoon character, seen in Steamboat Willie <\/em>and a silent version of Plane Crazy<\/em>, enter the public domain in the US on January 1st, 2024. (An early version of Minnie Mouse is also fortunately included.) There\u2019s still a complicated mess of protections around Mickey, but today is a moment public domain advocates have awaited for decades \u2014\u00a0and there are plenty of other exciting new entries as well.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Duke Law School\u2019s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, as usual, has a roundup of prominent works whose copyright protections lapse in the US today. The list includes sound recordings from 1923 and works in other media that were published in 1928. Among other things, that covers:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You can find a slew of public domain sound recordings for download at the Library of Congress National Jukebox. And if you\u2019re inspired by the above media or any other works entering the public domain this year, Techdirt<\/em> will be hosting its sixth annual Public Domain Game Jam to celebrate making games based on them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For ongoing characters like Mickey Mouse, of course, copyright law is particularly complicated. The public domain version of the character doesn\u2019t include significant design changes made in later works, like Sorcerer\u2019s Apprentice Mickey from Fantasia<\/em> in 1940. And you can\u2019t produce a work that falsely represents itself as a Disney production or a piece of official merchandise, since Mickey Mouse is also <\/em>a registered Disney trademark. Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain director Jennifer Jenkins has a far more comprehensive explanation of the law on Duke\u2019s blog.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The public domain is supposed to be the final destination of any copyrighted work \u2014 it\u2019s part of a compromise that acknowledges the benefits of letting artists and thinkers control and profit from their work in the short term while freely building on each other\u2019s ideas in the long term, a balance Disney itself relied upon when making fairy-tale adaptations like Snow White<\/em> and Cinderella<\/em>. (It\u2019s also a vital factor in letting archivists preserve old media after its creators die or can no longer be found, since it allows making copies without legal concerns \u2014\u00a0and only a tiny sliver of copyrighted works remain commercially valuable for the entire term of protection.) But it was frozen for 20 years in the US thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which was derisively dubbed the \u201cMickey Mouse Protection Act\u201d for delaying Steamboat Willie<\/em>\u2019s <\/em>entry into the public domain. Though despite the nickname, Disney was far from the only company lobbying for its passage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The result is that Mickey Mouse has become a symbol of extended copyright protections and (with varying degrees of fairness) Disney\u2019s vested stake in intellectual property law. When Disney angered Republican politicians by criticizing Florida\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Say Gay\u201d law, for instance, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) proposed a nigh-nuclear IP law rollback in the name of stripping \u201cwoke corporations like Disney of special copyright protections.\u201d We may well see legal fights over the precise limits of public domain Mickey, the way we have other characters like Sherlock Holmes \u2014\u00a0but today, it\u2019s a good day to think about new uses for old media.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [ad_1] It\u2019s finally happened: after nearly a century, Mickey Mouse has slipped off Disney\u2019s copyright leash. The first versions of the iconic cartoon character, seen in Steamboat Willie and a silent version of Plane Crazy, enter the public domain in the US on January 1st, 2024. (An early version of Minnie Mouse is also fortunately …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18332,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18331"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}