Duke School of Law Review of 2024 Public Domain Entries
Undoubtedly the most notable entry for 2024 is Steamboat Willy. However there are other interesting ones, including another Agatha Christie novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train, and lots of Blues music.
Here's an excerpt from another post on the Duke site about Steamboat Willy and Mickey and copyright:
On January 1, 2024, after almost a century of copyright protection, Mickey Mouse, or at least a version of Mickey Mouse, will enter the public domain. The first movies in which the iconic mouse appeared – Steamboat Willie and the silent version of Plane Crazy – were made in 1928 and works from that year go into the public domain in the United States on New Year's Day 2024.
The public domain has had some famous recent arrivals, but this is the most anticipated entry yet. Why? It is not simply that Mickey is a famous copyrighted character. So are Sherlock Holmes and Winnie the Pooh, and while they entered the public domain with some fanfare, it paled in comparison to this event. I'd like to offer a tentative answer. The reason that this event gathers so much attention is that it is the story of a 95-year-old love triangle, a tangled drama that rivals any Disney movie for twists and turns. The protagonists are Mickey, Disney and the Public Domain, and their relationship positively exemplifies the social media weasel-words "it's complicated."
On the one hand, Disney pushed for the law that extended the copyright term to 95 years, which became referred to derisively as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act." 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. Even though calling it the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" may overstate Disney's actual role in the legislative process – the measure passed because of a much broader lobbying effort – Disney was certainly a prominent supporter, and the Mouse was sometimes a figurehead.
On the other hand, Disney itself is a talented and successful practitioner of building upon the public domain. In fact, the public domain is Disney's bread and butter. Frozen was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. The Lion King draws from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Biblical stories, and possibly an epic poem about the founder of the Mali Empire. Fantasia's "The Sorcerer's Apprentic " comes from a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and in other segments the Fantasia film showcases public domain classical music.Alice in Wonderland, Snow White,The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and Pinocchio came from stories by Lewis Carroll, The Brothers Grimm, Victor Hugo, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, and Carlo Collodi.
The public domain includes not only works over which copyright has expired or never existed, but also uncopyrightable aspects of contemporary works—such as ideas, stock elements, and unoriginal material. The Mickey character itself is based on such public domain fodder. His personality and antics drew from silent film stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. Walt Disney told The American Magazine: "I think we were rather indebted to Charlie Chaplin …We wanted something appealing and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin…a little fellow trying to do the best he could." Ub Iwerks, who animated most of Steamboat Willie, wrote that Douglas Fairbanks "was the super-hero of his day, always winning, gallant and swashbuckling. Mickey's action was in that vein…I thought of him in that respect, and I had him do naturally the sort of thing Doug Fairbanks would do." Titles are also not copyrightable, and the name "Steamboat Willie" was a nod to the title of Buster Keaton's film from earlier the same year, Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Hence the triangle. Disney is both an emblem of term extension and its erosion of the public domain, and one of the strongest use-cases in favor of the maintenance of a rich public domain. Mickey is the symbol of both tendencies. Ironies abound. It may not be exactly the same as an oil company relying on solar power to run its rigs, but it is definitely in the same "massive irony" zip code. All of this makes the year when copyright finally expires over Mickey Mouse highly symbolic. The love triangle between Mickey, Disney, and the public domain is about to evolve, and perhaps even resolve, in real time.
But what does public domain status actually mean for the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey? There is a vast amount of misinformation about these issues online. In what follows, I will try to offer a straightforward explainer. What can and can't you do with the Mickey Mouse character as of January 1, 2024? How will Disney be affected? Does Disney still hold copyrights over later versions of Mickey? Does trademark law play a role? Keep reading for details.
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New York Public Library researchers find that up to 75% of books published before 1964 may be in the public domain
... According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights.
"That's sort of a staggering figure," Cram told Motherboard. "That's 25 to 35 percent of books that were renewed, while the rest were not. That's interesting for me as we think about copyright policy going forward."
Cram warns that since the project is still ongoing, the data may ultimately come out to be slightly more or slightly less, and that NYPL hasn't even begun to dive into films, music, or other types of creative works. But these early findings could help lawmakers craft copyright policies from an evidence-based standpoint that wasn't easily accessible in the past.
"Folks need to understand that this data is really important to the record of American creativity," he added. "It is the history of American creativity. To some extent, it is a great record of American creativity, and I think that the data should be usable not just by us, by the libraries, but by everyone. I think it belongs to the people and is the people's data."
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Books that entered the public domain
LitHub with a good list of some notable books that are now in the public domain.
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1927 enters public domain on Jan. 1, 2023
The linked page gives an overview of some of the notable pieces which will enter the public domain on January 1st.
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Rijks Museum puts 700,000 paintings online, copyright free
Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum (one of my favorites) has put over 700,000 digitized copies of its huge art collection online, and is making them available to reuse as public domain!
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