Mickey Mouse has a new title: resident of the public domain.

OK, yes, it's a bit more complicated than that, but let's begin with the basics: On January 1, the clock ran out on Disney's copyright protections for its 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie. That short film marked the very first appearance of Mickey Mouse, and thus, as the ball dropped over Times Square, so did the entertainment goliath's claims over the mouse. That's everything, right? Well, as The Verge explains, the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey is now fair use, but it "doesn’t include significant design changes made in later works, like Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey from Fantasia in 1940." Moreover, Disney still holds a trademark on Mickey, so it's still not lawful to use him in a bid to falsely represent merchandise or content as Disney.

And Disney is notorious for its legal crusade to keep Mickey—and much else in the magic kingdom—under tight copyright protections. "Disney pushed for the law that extended the copyright term to 95 years, which became referred to derisively as the 'Mickey Mouse Protection Act,'" explains Jennifer Jenkins, Director of the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. "This extension has been criticized by scholars as being economically regressive and having a devastating effect on our ability to digitize, archive, and gain access to our cultural heritage. It locked up not just famous works, but a vast swath of our culture, including material that is commercially unavailable." As Jenkins adds, the irony is that Disney has also massively benefited from works in the public domain as classic fairytales are the bedrock of so many of DIsney's blockbusters from Frozen to Snow White to Lion King.

With the copyright expired, movies and video games and other content containing Mickey Mouse is already making its way into the world. A horror film called Mickey's Mouse Trap, in which a killer dressed in a Mickey Mouse mask goes on a rampage, released its trailer on January 1. As did a trailer for a first-person shooter video game called Mouse that stars, you guessed it, a certain white-gloved mouse.

Clash of the Superheroes

Since acquiring Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in 2009, Disney has gone to great lengths to protect its new IP. Well, "new". As the New York Times notes, in 2021, Disney filed a slew of lawsuits aiming into invalidate copyright termination notices tied to Marvel characters like Iron Man, Spiderman, Blade, Captain Marvel, and Thor. The notices were served by IP lawyer Marc Toberoff representing five clients who were artists and writers involved in creating these 1960s-era Marvel characters. "The reclamation attempts stem from a provision of copyright law that, under certain conditions, allows authors or their heirs to regain ownership of a product after a given number of years," continues the Times. "Such efforts turn on whether authors worked as hired hands or produced the material on their own and then sold it to publishers. The Copyright Revision Act of 1976, which opened the door to termination attempts, bans termination for people who delivered work at the “instance and expense” of an employer." Of course, Disney claims these termination notices are bogus as all the artists were hired hands for Marvel, and thus blocked from such claims. Last month, Disney settled with one of the artists' estates for an undisclosed amount.

THE VERDICT:

After nearly a century of keeping its entire kingdom under legal lock-and-key, Disney is finally seeing one of its foundational pieces of IP enter the public domain. Will it be a doomsday scenario for the studio, or more of a non-event? And how will this reshape Disney’s copyright fights that have put a chokehold on creators for decades?