You've probably seen endless posts and memes about Steamboat Willie since the year started. What's the deal with that?
Every year, the copyrights on works expire and those works come into the public domain, which means that anyone can use them as material to produce new works -- of art, music, literature, or whatever. Modern copyright law gives quite a long time of protection: for most works, it's 95 years, so at the end of 2023, works from 1928 became available to the public domain. Disney has been a major force in pushing to make copyright protection that long, and protecting Mickey Mouse from being used by other artists is one of the main reasons. As you've no doubt also heard, only the earliest version of Mickey, from Steamboat Willie, has become available. You still can't use the Mickey from the 1980s or from The Sorcerer's Apprentice!
Disn
ey is not too thrilled with this and has still been trying to enforce Mickey protections on platforms such as YouTube through filing claims based on trademark laws, so we'll have to see how that plays out. If you make a video featuring a Steamboat Willie clip and it gets demonetized because Disney files a complaint, you can push back on that.
Quite a few famous books have come into the public domain this year, including All Quiet on the Western Front, Lady Chatterley's Lover (so smutty that it was banned!), Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, The House at Pooh Corner, and Peter Pan. Many other works have also come into the public domain, of course, and you can see lists at the links below.
The copyright on sound recordings is a little longer, so we are now getting songs from 1923. The most popular of these is the funny novelty song "Yes! We Have No Bananas." This song was so popular that just about everybody recorded a performance of it. You can hear this song in Yiddish, Spanish, and Italian. There was even a song titled "I've Got the Yes! We Have No Bananas Blues," in which the singer laments not being able to go anywhere without hearing that darn song.
If you're interested in questions around public domain, copyright, and what's coming into play right now, here are some excellent and straightforward articles to read:
Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle, from Duke Law
The World’s Most Famous Mouse Joins the Public Domain, from the Internet Archive
Mickey’s Bad Day, or, The Ecosystem, from the Internet Archive
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