Poll of the Day > lmao people actually think Mickey Mouse will go into public domain next year

(+) Yeah! (+)

As if Disney won't spend millions in bribes to prevent that

Are they doing anything to move the needle now?

Yeah it's getting a bit late to stop it if they're trying to game copyright legislation again

They didnt do much to retain the copyright of Winnie the Pooh (only certain aspects are trademarked), and hes a pretty popular character (particularly abroad in places like Japan), so Im curious as to if theyll try with Mickey. He is their main mascot and symbol, so I could understand them fighting harder to retain Mickey. But imagine if they dont. Mickey could get way more involved in Soras adventures and way more wacky.

JigsawTD3 posted...

They didnt do much to retain the copyright of Winnie the Pooh (only certain aspects are trademarked), and hes a pretty popular character (particularly abroad in places like Japan), so Im curious as to if theyll try with Mickey. He is their main mascot and symbol, so I could understand them fighting harder to retain Mickey. But imagine if they dont. Mickey could get way more involved in Soras adventures and way more wacky.

Sora and Mickey kiss?

The real misunderstanding is people who think "public domain" means anyone can use it. It'll still be tied up in trademark, which would make doing anything with it problematic at best.

And public domain only really applies to certain versions of the character - which is why you can technically do anything you want with Wizard of Oz (which is public domain), but still can't have ruby slippers (which were introduced in the 1937 movie, which isn't public domain). Steamboat Willie may go into public domain next year, but only that specific version of Mickey would count for it.

What makes it even more complicated is that something can technically be public domain in one place but not in another, so you have to be really careful if you plan to do something with a work. It's possible that Steamboat Willie will still be under copyright in Europe until 2036 or even 2041, for instance (depending on how things are interpreted).

Basically, copyright is kind of a mess.



Zareth posted...

As if Disney won't spend millions in bribes to prevent that

They already have. It's the only reason Mickey is still under copyright at all. They've been bribing people for decades now to keep pushing back the copyright expiration date.

The problem is, they've kind of pushed it to the limit of what they can get away with, and probably won't be able to do it again. So they're going to shift to entirely different tactics to make it difficult to ever really do anything with their properties.

Which is actually part of why they've been doing the live-action Disney movies - it's a way of exploiting copyright to keep those specific characters and their look under copyright even once the original cartoons expire (starting with Snow White in about 10 years).

After the one with Winnie the Pooh, it would be cool to see a horror movie with Mickey Mouse.

Copyright makes so little sense to me as it pertains to media IPs. Imagine if the dude who invented shoes was able to go to court and won and he was the ONLY guy who could make shoes. That's what media copyright feels like to me.

GanglyKhan posted...

Copyright makes so little sense to me as it pertains to media IPs. Imagine if the dude who invented shoes was able to go to court and won and he was the ONLY guy who could make shoes. That's what media copyright feels like to me.

Except they aren't copyrighting all media, they're copyrighting the specific media they created (with a few exceptions that do definitely overstep the bounds of reasonableness). Coming up with a shoe design and copyrighting that shoe design seems pretty reasonable to me, so long as it's confined to the unique aspects of that design and not anything too broad (though specific technologies will often be patented, and that's also often reasonable). This is, of course, not to say the concept isn't horribly abused at every possible turn, because that's just how the corporate world works, but fundamentally it's pretty sensible to ensure that people can continue to profit off of their own work instead of having to compete with people ripping it off.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

They already have. It's the only reason Mickey is still under copyright at all. They've been bribing people for decades now to keep pushing back the copyright expiration date.

The problem is, they've kind of pushed it to the limit of what they can get away with, and probably won't be able to do it again. So they're going to shift to entirely different tactics to make it difficult to ever really do anything with their properties.

Which is actually part of why they've been doing the live-action Disney movies - it's a way of exploiting copyright to keep those specific characters and their look under copyright even once the original cartoons expire (starting with Snow White in about 10 years).

The really annoying thing is that they aren't wrong to push for that. They've just gone about it in a way that does more harm than good. As they stand, copyright laws have not evolved the way that is needed to align with a digital world. When the 75-year limit was introduced, the idea of any company being able to make use of their media 75 years later was largely unfathomable, let alone reasonable. Releasing the content into public domain to ensure that interested parties could continue to use and distribute it worked better for everyone because it ensures the media is preserved.

We live in a world now, though, where Disney is still actively using Mickey and (their) Snow White, and they very easily could make all of that original media available. They should be able to do that and profit from it without having to compete with knock-offs. Pushing back the cutoff time for copyright expiry, though, has only delayed having to deal with that and will ultimately fail to solve the problem, while making it that much harder for abandoned media to be preserved because it takes longer for it to fall into public domain.

Instead, copyright expiry should be based on whether or not a given IP is still seeing commercial use. In a world of streaming and digital distribution, there's really no reason *not* to make a property available if a company is still interested in profiting from it. Because they can continue to profit from their creations, the law should continue to protect their ability to do so for as long as they wish. Conversely, though, if they choose not to make it available, that should be treated as a decision to abandon the property to public domain and the copyright should lapse. There of course needs to be some amount of grace period there, to account for the time spent producing remakes and the like, but even 5 years would be plenty. Certainly not 90 or whatever Disney's inflated it to by now.

Unless there's something over the next ten months that changes, Mickey is going public domain. Disney can't get away with it easily like they did in 98. There would be so much backlash to them extending the copyright a third time around.

It doesn't mean Mickey in his entirety will be public domain. I kind of expect a horror version of Steamboat Willie before the decade ends.

I imagine there will be a lot of legality and red tape on the extent of how he can be portrayed but no doubt a bunch of filmmakers will jump on it and make what they can out of whatever aspects become free use.

Mickey Horror Picture Show