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Mickey Mouse has long symbolized corporate efforts to control copyrighted material. As of January 1, an early version of the character is at last in the public domain.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Harvard’s Bundy standard
- The real Harvard scandal
- The most mysterious cells in our bodies don’t belong to us.
A Big Step for Mousekind
An early version of Mickey Mouse may soon be everywhere: on shirts, in movies, onstage making crude remarks and shaking his hips in little white trousers (actually, John Oliver already had an actor do that on his show). As of Monday, the iteration of Mickey Mouse from the 1928 movie Steamboat Willie—the mischievous rodent who uses a goose as a trombone—is available in the public domain in America. Later depictions of the character are still under copyright. But the change is a major moment that Disney fought hard to postpone.
In 1998, Congress extended copyright periods for a range of works. The Copyright Term Extension Act—sometimes snarkily called the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” due to Disney’s role in lobbying Congress—lengthened the period of copyright for many materials published before 1978 to 95 years (Steamboat Willie, along with other creative works such as D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, turns 95 this year). That law “transferred wealth to a tiny subset of rights owners,” Jennifer Jenkins, a clinical law professor at Duke University and the director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, told me in an email, and “stymied” the public’s ability to access and build on American cultural heritage.
Disney itself has a complicated relationship with copyright: Although the company has a vested interest in retaining the rights to its inventions, it has also benefited greatly from public-domain works. Some of its hits are based on existing intellectual property; think of the fairy tales underlying major movies, or the Hamlet plotlines in the Lion King franchise. Its movies draw on sources including Lewis Carroll, the Brothers Grimm, Victor Hugo, and Hans Christian Andersen, Jenkins explained. A spokesperson for Disney told me, “We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright, as well as work to safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters.”
A purpose of copyright laws is to stimulate the creation of new works, Paul Heald, a law professor and an expert on copyright at the University of Illinois, told me. Copyright laws assure artists that if they create something, they can enjoy exclusive rights to it for a period of time after its release. But the length of that period is a balancing act: If copyright laws are too restrictive, Heald said, that can curb creative expression. More works being in the public domain is not only good for creativity, he told me—“it’s part of the plan of the Framers of the Constitution.” The Constitution enshrined a right to copyright for “limited times,” after which works entered the public domain. In the 20th century, big companies began pushing to retain control for longer periods. Copyright law, once straightforward, began to resemble the tax code, with its attendant fingerprints of corporate interests, Heald explained.
Over the past 25 years, the dynamics of copyright have shifted. Major tech companies now prioritize a rich public domain, and products such as Google Books and Amazon’s self-publishing project rely on public-domain works, Heald told me. If, at the end of the previous century, companies that released creative works were trying to retain control over them, now some of the big companies looking to organize and commercialize the internet are also acknowledging the value of freely available resources.
The lifting of a copyright can allow creative ideas to flourish, including ones that veer into bizarre and macabre territory: When the copyright on Winnie-the-Pooh was lifted last year, a trailer for a slasher movie titled Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey was released. And on Monday, a movie trailer featuring a serial-killer Mickey Mouse dropped within hours of the copyright lifting. Who knows what people will think of next. Regardless, anyone out there with a Free the Mouse bumper sticker on their car can probably peel it off now.
Related:
- The Andy Warhol case that could wreck American art
- We’re witnessing the birth of a new artistic medium. (From 2022)
Today’s News
- Ukraine and Russia have swapped more than 200 soldiers from each side in the largest prisoner exchange since the start of the war.
- Two bombs have killed at least 95 people who were near the tomb of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani during a procession for the fourth anniversary of his assassination by the U.S., according to Iran’s state media.
- Donald Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that removed him from the state’s primary ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment’s insurrection clause.
Evening Read
Maybe Don’t Send That Voice Note
By Jacob Sweet
My phone alerts me as I’m eating lunch that the next 150 seconds of my life have been hijacked: I’ve received a voice note. The sender is my friend’s 23-year-old sister, Wendi Gjata, who is notorious for dispatches that veer so far from their supposed topic that the listener can only guess at their original purpose. After an indulgent 20-second preamble, Wendi finally gets to the point and responds to my inquiry about her favorite way to message: “I’m here to explain why voice memos suck,” she says cheerily, “while demonstrating it actively.”
Voice notes have been around, in some form, for more than a decade. WeChat rolled out the ability to send these voicemail-like audio missives in 2011, WhatsApp followed two years later, and Apple’s iMessages joined the party in 2014. But in recent years, they’ve become incredibly popular …
As with any newer technology, people haven’t yet agreed on a set of norms, which adds to the contentiousness, Sylvia Sierra, a communications professor at Syracuse University, told me … For example, Wendi recently received a six-minute memo that didn’t contain anything substantial enough to respond to. So she shot back, “Hey, thanks for including me in that thought process. Anyways …” and then went on her own rant.
Read the full article.
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Culture Break
Learn. It doesn’t have to be a drag to learn a language. Start by picking up some slang, Valerie Trapp recommends.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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