As noted a few days ago, many notable works from the 1920s have ascended to the public domain in the US this year, as of New Year's Day. Cartoon Brew asks, What Happens When 'Steamboat Willie' Hits The Public Domain In 2024? and briefly covers a bit of what the public is set to gain. Notably, the earliest iteration of Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain then as a result.
Assuming that 17 U.S.C. §§ 108, 203(a)(2), 301(c), 302, 303, 304(c)(2) is not modified yet again, be sure to observe the difference between trademarks and copyright.
Previously:
(2022) 2023's Public Domain is a Banger
(2022) Digitization Wars, Redux
(2022) Public Domain Day 2022
(2021) Public Domain Day in the USA: Works from 1925 are Open to All!
Related Stories
Works from 1925 are now open to all! The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School's blog covers the famous works which rise to the public domain on January 1st, 2021.
On January 1, 2021, copyrighted works from 1925 will enter the US public domain,1 where they will be free for all to use and build upon. These works include books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (in the original German), silent films featuring Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and music ranging from the jazz standard Sweet Georgia Brown to songs by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, W.C. Handy, and Fats Waller.
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessley into the past."
F. Scott Fitsgerald, The Great GatsbyThis is not just the famous last line from The Great Gatsby. It also encapsulates what the public domain is all about. A culture is a continuing conversation between present and past. On Public Domain Day, we all have a “green light,” in keeping with the Gatsby theme, to use one more year of that rich cultural past, without permission or fee.
1925 was a good year for music. Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton were some of those active then. Though some consider it the best year so far for great books and many classics were published then, among them is the original German version of the all too relevant The Trial by Franz Kafka.
Previously:
(2020) Internet Archive Files Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Publisher Copyright Infringement Lawsuit
(2020) Internet Archive Ends “Emergency Library” Early to Appease Publishers
(2020) Project Gutenberg Public Domain Library Blocked in Italy for Copyright Infringement
(2020) ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ Turns 120
(2020) University Libraries Offer Online "Lending" of Scanned In-Copyright Books
(2019) The House Votes in Favor of Disastrous Copyright Bill
As the new year starts, Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain reminds us that works from 1926 ascend to public domain, and become available for use by any and all in any manner they may wish. There is also a lot of recorded music starting to enter the public domain, as an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 hit the scene. Most of them music recordings are salvaged from very fragile 78 RPM platters using multiple methods.
In 2022, the public domain will welcome a lot of “firsts”: the first Winnie-the-Pooh book from A. A. Milne, the first published novels from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, the first books of poems from Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker. What’s more, for the first time ever, thanks to a 2018 law called the Music Modernization Act, a special category of works—sound recordings—will finally begin to join other works in the public domain. On January 1 2022, the gates will open for all of the recordings that have been waiting in the wings. Decades of recordings made from the advent of sound recording technology through the end of 1922—estimated at some 400,000 works—will be open for legal reuse.
Why celebrate the public domain? When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. That is something Winnie-the-Pooh would appreciate. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Google Books can make works fully available online. This helps enable access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. 1926 was a long time ago. The vast majority of works from 1926 are out of circulation. When they enter the public domain in 2022, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.
The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. The whole point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But it also ensures that those rights last for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! As explained in a New York Times editorial:
- When a work enters the public domain it means the public can afford to use it freely, to give it new currency . . . [public domain works] are an essential part of every artist’s sustenance, of every person’s sustenance.
See also, What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2022? A festive countdown which, were it not blocked by javascript, would highlight a selection of what has become available.
Previously:
(2021) Public Domain Day in the USA: Works from 1925 are Open to All!
(2020) January 1, 2020 is Public Domain Day: Works From 1924 Are Open to All!
(2018) Public Domain Day is Coming
(2014) Happy Public Domain Day: Here are the Works that Copyright Extension Stole From You in 2015
and more ...
Digital librarian, Karen Coyle, has written about controlled digital lending (warning for PDF), where an artificial scarcity is applied to digital artifacts to limit concurrent access similar to the limitations that a finite number of objects exhibit in libraries' physical collections. This concept raises a lot of questions about not just copyright and digital versus physical, but also about reading in general. Some authors and publisher associations have already begun to object to controlled digital lending. However, few set aside misinformation and misdirection to allow for a proper, in-depth discussion of the issues.
We now have another question about book digitization: can books be digitized for the purpose of substituting remote lending in the place of the lending of a physical copy? This has been referred to as "Controlled Digital Lending (CDL)," a term developed by the Internet Archive for its online book lending services. The Archive has considerable experience with both digitization and providing online access to materials in various formats, and its Open Library site has been providing digital downloads of out of copyright books for more than a decade. Controlled digital lending applies solely to works that are presumed to be in copyright.
Controlled digital lending works like this: the Archive obtains and retains a physical copy of a book. The book is digitized and added to the Open Library catalog of works. Users can borrow the book for a limited time (2 weeks) after which the book "returns" to the Open Library. While the book is checked out to a user no other user can borrow that "copy." The digital copy is linked one-to-one with a physical copy, so if more than one copy of the physical book is owned then there is one digital loan available for each physical copy.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/20/free-for-2023/#oy-canada
40 years ago, giant entertainment companies embarked on a slow-moving act of arson. The fuel for this arson was copyright term extension (making copyrights last longer), including retrospective copyright term extensions that took works out of the public domain and put them back into copyright for decades. Vast swathes of culture became off-limits, pseudo-property with absentee landlords, with much of it crumbling into dust.
After 55-75 years, only 2% of works have any commercial value. After 75 years, it declines further. No wonder that so much of our cultural heritage is now orphan works, with no known proprietor. Extending copyright on all works – not just those whose proprietors sought out extensions – incinerated whole libraries full of works, permanently.
Jennifer Jenkins of the Duke University Center for the Public Domain has a very nice assemblage of some of the more notable items going into public domain this year: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2023/
Public Domain Day 2024 is coming up in a few weeks. The Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a briefing document, Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle, about what happens when the earlier versions of Mickey Mouse finally elevate to the public domain at the start of 2024. Included is a Venn diagram of what you can and can't work with.
Steamboat Willie and the characters it depicts – which include both Mickey and Minnie Mouse – will be in the public domain. As indicated in the green circle, this means that anyone can share, adapt, or remix that material. You can start your creative engines too—full steam ahead! You could take a page out of the Winnie-the-Pooh: the Deforested Edition playbook and create “Steamboat Willie: the Climate Change Edition,” in which Mickey’s boat is grounded in a dry riverbed. You could create a feminist remake with Minnie Mouse as the central figure. You could reimagine Mickey and Minnie dedicating themselves to animal welfare. (The animals in Steamboat Willie are contorted rather uncomfortably into musical instruments. PETA would not approve.)
You can do all of this and more, so long as you steer clear of the subsisting rights indicated by the orange circles, namely:
Use the original versions of Mickey and Minnie Mouse from 1928, without copyrightable elements of later iterations (though not every later iteration will be copyrightable, as I explain below) and
Do not confuse consumers into thinking that your creation is produced or sponsored by Disney as a matter of trademark law. One way to help ensure that your audience is not confused is to make the actual source of the work – you or your company – clear on the title screen or cover, along with a prominent disclaimer indicating that your work was not produced, endorsed, licensed, or approved by Disney.
So, is January 1, 2024 doomsday for Disney? No. Disney still retains copyright over newer iterations of Mickey such as the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” Mickey from Fantasia (1940) as well as trademarks over Mickey as a brand identifier. People will still go to its theme parks, pay to see its movies, buy its merchandise. Its brand identity will remain intact.
In sum, yes, you can use Mickey in new creative works. There are some more complex peripheral legal issues, but here is your guide through them.
Cory Doctorow has an analysis of this upcoming milestone event in a recent post on his blog.
Previously:
(2023) What Happens When 'Steamboat Willie' Hits The Public Domain In 2024?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday January 03 2023, @09:46AM (4 children)
US copyright laws are so insane, corrupt and anti-cultural that anything good has already been copied, cracked, read, listen to, watched and distributed without any regards to copyright by those who want to enjoy those works before they die.
Copyright doesn't matter. It stopped to matter when the extensions stopped making any sense.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday January 03 2023, @01:12PM (3 children)
[...] anything good has already been copied, cracked, read, listen to, watched and distributed [...]
Thus there has been this ongoing push to deploy digital restrictions management (DRM) technology throughout the hardware and software stacks: You already have HDMI's High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), UEFI, TPM 2.0 (not just 1,0), and Pluton.
Once each layer of the stack has DRM and once each layer's DRM is interconnected with the adjacent layers from top to bottom then the laws will come to make non-compliance illegal and you can kiss all that *BSD, */Linux, HaikuOS, or anything else goodbye. Look at how whitebox systems were basically banned for a while and, for all practical purposes, still are. That was about preventing GNU/Linux from hitting the store shelves via the OEMs and had really only one lobbying firm, M$, behind the push. With DRM there are all kinds of hangers on, not just M$ but also MPAA, RIAA, medical device manufacturers, automobile manufacturers, farm equipment manufacturers, mobile phone manufacturers, etc. They're already quite active greasing palms and have been for years now. The time to fight is now, before it manifests.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2023, @04:40PM
Reading this makes me very glad to not be living in a fascist corporatist police state with no human rights (AKA the USA). Something like you just described would never be allowed in free countries.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 03 2023, @05:21PM
The Right to Read [gnu.org] is a scary bit of (thankfully so far) fiction about what happens once they get what they want.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday January 03 2023, @05:33PM
DRM will never work because the last layer is in plain text, plain audio and plain image: people read unencrypted text, listen to analog audio and watch moving analog images. That last layer will never have DRM. Even if the sumbitches manage to lock the whole stack tight, people will just scan books, record the audio off the speaker and re-record movies with a camcorder pointing at the TV.
All DRM will ever achieve is inconvenience the shit out of everybody and lower the quality of the pirated copy a bit. It'll never achieve anything more than that, by virtue of human beings' input channels being impossible to DRM.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Tuesday January 03 2023, @09:57AM (8 children)
They'll extend copyright another 20 years.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday January 03 2023, @10:12AM (7 children)
I doubt they'll get away with it another time. However in this case it won't matter because the character in Steamboat Willie isn't anything like the current Mickey Mouse. It wasn't until The Band Concert in 1935 that we got the current colour scheme, and even then it's still not quite the current version, although reasonably close.
So they've got more than ten years to work on something.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 03 2023, @11:41AM (5 children)
Why not? They got away with it the first time. Nobody involved was punished in any way. Just like 19 years ago, there's extensive lobbying paid for by a handful of giant copyright owners including the Mouse, and basically no money behind protecting the public domain.
They'll do it, and there won't be much by way of opposition.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday January 03 2023, @12:58PM (4 children)
The difference is that at the moment, in retribution for "woke" politics, approximately half of congress is dead set against anything Disney proposes. US Senator Hawley, representing Missouri, even proposed a bill specifically targeting Disney [senate.gov]. Sadly that's piggybacking the subject of copyright to completely unrelated politics and is preventing reform from getting the attention it deserves. Worse, approximately half are going to end up dead set on the side of the heinous copyright extension simply because it has been tied to an unrelated topic which they favor.
See Republicans took away Disney’s special status in Florida. Now they’re gunning for Mickey himself [latimes.com] at The Los Angeles Times and Disney's Mickey Mouse Copyright in Republican Crosshairs Over LGBTQ Stance [newsweek.com] at Newsweek. It's unfortunate that confgress is mixing up unrelated topics and not taking on copyright reform as a topic of its own. It certainly deserves more attention in and of itself.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 03 2023, @01:40PM (1 child)
And I'm certain those vaunted principles will be worth a significant amount of money to those in Congress who know full well how their bread is buttered.
I know about the anti-woke rhetoric. I also know that when push comes to shove, money has a way of greasing the wheels in Washington.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday January 03 2023, @01:52PM
Yeah, the whole thing could be a combination of grandstanding for a specific target audience while giving a strong hint to Disney and co that more money would be appreciated. When it comes down to it, it is nearly always the money which determines the outcome of not just the elections but the decisions made by the politicians while in office.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday January 03 2023, @05:24PM (1 child)
> certainly deserves more attention in and of itself.
Yes! I feel however, that copyright issues have been forced to take a back seat to more urgent problems, that being pulling our politics back from the brink. That a US President, empowered by mobs of the violent, predatory, cruel, bigoted, unfair, and stupid, actually tried a coup and is today nearly 2 years later still free though we keep hearing that he's in Big Trouble, has diverted a lot of attention that was needed elsewhere. He still has way too many supporters. One of the most enraging things about the situation is that it was all so unnecessary. To allow such assholes to get that far in acting out their dark fantasies in which they murder the Vice President, Speaker of the House, half of Congress, and anyone else who gets in their way, to save the world from non-existent, invented threats that were drummed up for purposes of ratings and excuses, is a huge failure of national leadership. It should never have happened, and it wouldn't have happened had the politicians not been so craven about stopping the chief authoritarian when they had the chance. But it did happen, making the problem twice as bad. Now we have yet more work to do to clean up that mess.
There are a lot of interconnections, however. For instance, to the extent that copyright impedes education and research, it contributes to the problem of extremism. Poor health could be another factor driving people towards extremism, and the US health care system is notoriously greedy. It's harder to think clearly when you're hurting or sick. Meanwhile, in the back, the problem of Global Warming gets bigger and worse. That too is connected-- there's research showing that the term "hot tempered" to mean one prone to anger and violence, and "heated argument" to mean an argument that is on the edge of turning into a fist fight or other physical confrontation, is not a purely invented expression that has no connection to the meaning of the component words, hot temperatures really do make people more hot tempered.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2023, @07:31AM
The problem is that there is not one single thing he said in that speech that some other politician hasn't said, usually in an even more inflammatory way. "We will Fight!", "We won't give in", "We'll win this", "Take the fight to Congress". It's all rhetoric that every politician uses.
You can argue that Drumpf actually meant it, but there's no way to prosecute him for speech without also greenlighting prosecuting almost every other politician for their speech. It's why two years later there still is no prosecution, and despite the constant noise there never will be.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday January 03 2023, @07:27PM
Talking of which, Steamboat Fatty [wikipedia.org].
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2023, @11:46AM
You'll use Mickey... at your own peril.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Opportunist on Tuesday January 03 2023, @12:26PM
The Mickey Mafia will do what any YouTube influenza teenie-girl does when their hairdo gets out of fashion: Pay for another extension.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2023, @01:10PM
The huge difference now from twenty years ago is the Haus of Maus has diversified its portfolio.
They will continue to enforce their Maus trademark, but expect to see many new ones in the future.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday January 03 2023, @01:51PM (6 children)
I would be surprised if there isn't some kind of extension or legal shenanigans at work. The lawyers and all the other tools of power are probably working overtime to make sure that the image of the Mouse doesn't fall into the public domain. After all Disney can't allow Mickey or even Proto-Mickey (or Mortimer or Steamboat Willie) to get into the hands of the public. After all he could do anything then that will tarnish his over the top good image. They do care about his image as much as this single cartoon.
That said there was or is a difference in appearance between the Steamboat Willie era Mouse and Mickey Mouse of today. Steamboat Mickey, if you will, has a much longer tail, a larger belly, all black eyes and more gaunt facial features and the ears are more attached to his skull. Compared to modern Mickey that has a more rounded appearance of the face, flatter belly, thicker limbs and he wears white gloves. Also he is usually in colour and not black and white.
If this somehow doesn't get extended and protected I guess the Disney Lawyers will sue anyone into oblivion that uses the wrong version of the mouse. After all this isn't modern Mickey that is going into the public domain. Mistakes will be made. You might as well have Itchy from the Simpsons playing the role of Steamboat Willie (which they already did on a Simpsons episode). But they will probably also try and sue for all other reasons under the sun the make some examples of people so that Mickey doesn't start doing or appearing in the wrong settings ie violence, hardcore drugs and/or sex/beastiality cartoons etc. So while it might be in the public domain, the domain is a minefield and one taking a wrong step will have dire consequences. After all no small entity is going to afford being sued by Disney.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2023, @02:34PM (2 children)
I was going to post a URL of the famous Bloom County panel with the Disney characters in a dungeon with "Draw or Die" on the wall
but can't find it anywhere.
Coincidence, or conspiracy?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Freeman on Tuesday January 03 2023, @04:31PM (1 child)
Knowing Disney, I would say litigation.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by MostCynical on Tuesday January 03 2023, @09:38PM
cartoonists are waiting..
https://somethingpositive.net/comic/into-the-public-frontier/ [somethingpositive.net]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2023, @08:08PM (2 children)
The original Pooh went PD this year.
We'll see what happens to the poor slob who does a drawing with Pooh in a red shirt.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2023, @08:10PM (1 child)
Would Disney and Paramount rip them apart like mad dogs if it was Pooh in a Trek red shirt?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday January 03 2023, @10:18PM
"You'll never find a more litigious corporation. We must be cautious." - Obi-Wan Kenobi (Probably, in some alternate universe court room drama.)
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Tuesday January 03 2023, @10:09PM (1 child)
Over 50 years ago Disney sued Dan O'neal and a group of cartoonists after they published cartoons including MM when Disney forgot to renew it's copyright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Pirates [wikipedia.org]
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Wednesday January 04 2023, @06:55AM
So glad someone mentioned Dan O'Neill et al's Air Pirates Funnies—"nephews"…HA!—but the part about Disney forgetting to renew copyright never happened. As if!
(Score: 4, Funny) by sigterm on Tuesday January 03 2023, @10:32PM (1 child)
This means that Walter Elias Disney (1901-1966) will no longer be receiving royalties for the hard work of his (also long-dead) employees, royalties that he would no doubt have shared with them in the afterlife, encouraging them to continue creating amazing works of art.
As the years go by, an increasing number of these older works will enter the public domain. This could eventually lead to the closure of Disney's entire ouija board division, and thousands of jobs would be lost.
The lack of robust legislation offering perpetual copyright protection for all works of art means that unscrupulous schysters are free to simply appropriate older works and cash in on them without adding anything of real value. Imagine what would happen if someone were to just straight up steal older tales, like Snow White, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Pinocchio, and pass them off as their own works.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2023, @07:12AM
OMG that is Terrible!!! How will his family survive? What will they do? This poor starving artiste created this mouse figure and soon anyone will be able to copy it! Some thing must be done!!!!!