The little guy is due to come out of copyright in 2023 thanks to Sonny Bono’s act extending the limit which should have expired in the 90s. Winnie the Pooh has until 2026 (not coincidentally Disney has both copyrights for these characters who get saved from the public domain each time they’re due to expire.)
Sherlock Holmes at the time Doyle’s copyright expired didn’t have a big studio to save his ass so he’s PD now, as well he should be. How long can Disney and the other studios get away with this? When copyright was first enacted in the US it was 14 years. Now it’s over 100 years in some cases. As a fan of 30s movies this makes me furious, they should be PD by now.
In the Sony Betamax copyright case of 1984 the SCOTUS said this of copyright:
It seems to me that big media are making a mockery of that. Hasn’t anyone appealed this Mickey Mouse BS to the Supreme Court? You can bet your ass that Disney already has its lawyers and politicians working on ways to extend that 2023 deadline. I don’t know how they keep getting away with it but I’m sure they will again.
It’s not just Mickey Mouse – Tarzan is still owned by Burroughs, Inc., and is older than The Mouse, but apparently they still have the character nailed down.
Ironically, it affects Disney, who has limited use of the character. See here:
There was at least one Mickey Mouse cartoon for which Disney did not hold a copyright. I don’t recall which one(s), but I was surprised when I saw it, ages ago, on a non-Disney VHS tape.
This is one thing I’d really like to see addressed by an overhaul of intellectual property laws. The gray area between copyright and trademark for characters has become quite murky as certain characters like Mickey Mouse, Superman, etc. have become such a central part of media empires.
I personally don’t think Mickey Mouse will ever fall out of copyright, at least in our lifetimes. Part me wonders if they will eventually make some sort of “special perpetual copyright” that applies to characters of the type I’ve mentioned above.
I remember hearing the issue covered on NPR around the time of the extension. They spoke to the great grandchildren of John Philip Souza, who stood to lose large amounts of income from his works lapsing into public domain. I mean, have you no sympathy for these heirs, who might be forced to actually do something to get by?
Have a look at our earlier discussion, where I learned that the change in copyright term was not to protect Mickey, but merely to bring the US into compliance with the Berne Convention.
Except that thread itself establishes that the Berne Convention copyright period is 50 years. A country can provide longer copyright protection, but that isn’t mandated by the Berne Convention.
The EU decided to extend the copyright term to 70 years, and the United States voluntarily did the same, to stay in step with the EU. That was a policy decision made by the United States. It was not forced on the US by the Berne Convention.
Can someone clarify, if the copyright were to expire, would the only effect be that Mickey Mouse cartoons which were older than however-many-decades-it-is could now be copied and distributed by anyone, and likewise for Superman comics (or radio broadcasts or whatever) that were older than however many decades? In other words, it wouldn’t enable, say, Marvel Studios to make a “Superman vs. the Avengers” movie, or Warner Bros. to make a “Mickey Mouse meets Bugs Bunny” cartoon? I’m guessing it wouldn’t, because Mickey and Superman are still trademarks of their respective companies.
Given that these companies are still actively producing lots of new work with these characters, it doesn’t feel wrong to me that they are able to maintain control over how the characters are used. But they’ve had plenty of time to profit from reprinting the really old stuff.
But as for the Souza family that eschereal mentions, nuts to them. When’s the last time they released a John Philip Souza march?
It seems like this is actually adequately addressed by current IP laws.
Copyright covers the specific works, so if a work falls out of copyright, it can be reproduced for free. I think this is as it should be (although I think the term should be shorter, and I think there’s zero public policy rationale for lengthening the term after creation of a work. It’s pure rent-seeking).
Trademark covers the characters, so if you’re continually making use of the character to tell new stories, you get to keep that right in perpetuity.
The devil is in the details, of course, but the basic framework is already kind of doing what you want it to do.
The character “Mickey Mouse” can’t be protected by copyright. That’s not what copyright protection is form. A movie with Mickey Mouse could be. So "Steamboat Willie " is protected by copyright. When that expires anyone who wants could show that movie. The movie will go out of copyright in a few years and that copyright is not going to be extended.
But that won’t mean you can now make your own new Mickey Mouse cartoons, because Mickey Mouse is protected by trademark law.
That’s right, you say “Sherlock Holmes”. Arthur Conan Doyle will live on long after Disney’s head gets terminal freezer burn. And that’s because Sherlock Holmes is public domain. Whenever a work wants to have a character play detective, they give him the old pipe and deerstalker hat. It’s free and it’s fun, but it also means that Sherlock Holmes will never die. Meanwhile every time a TV show wants to use a hat with ears, it has to do a cost benefit analysis to see if it can afford it. Let the mouse go into public domain. It may become a beloved figure. It could happen.
To clear a few things up: the purpose of a trademark, and trademark law in general, is to enable consumers to identify the source of a product. It’s all about reducing marketplace confusion. If you got sick from eating a pear and sued Dole, but the pear was actually sold by Dale, who has a really similar looking logo, well, he’s probably infringing on Dole’s trademark.
In the case of creative works like Mickey Mouse: he’s a trademarked character who denotes products (movies, clothing, souvenir hats, etc.) made by Disney. As long as Disney continues to use Mickey Mouse as a trademark, no one else can use Mickey’s image, name, or other identifying characteristics to market or sell a product, because that would fraudulently imply that it was a Disney product.
Should the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons’ copyright expire, people would then be free to make copies, distribute them, even alter them and draw dicks all over Steamboat Willie if they want. However, they still can’t use Mickey’s name or image to sell their copy of the cartoon, due to Disney’s trademark. I recall that, back in the 80s, a comic book publisher published some very early comic strips drawn by Walt Disney that had fallen into the public domain that showed Mickey in a less-than-flattering light (he swore, used guns, that sort of thing). They called them “Uncensored Mouse” and published them with blank covers to avoid the trademark issues. Disney sued anyway, and the hassle forced the publisher to drop the title after two issues.
Characters can be protected under copyright law as creative works of expression independent of any novel, film, etc., they might appear in. Even the Batmobile has been found to be a character protected by copyright.
As for characters that do fall into the public domain, I don’t think it’s the case that a trademark owner can stop the creation of new original stories featuring that character. They can only stop trademark uses. It’s a tricky line but trademark law can’t be used to essentially extend copyright protection.
While the pipe is part of the stories, he wasn’t depicted wearing a deerstalker hat until movies made in the 1930s (which are still copyrighted).
And there are all kinds of designs for hats with ears that have nothing to do with Disney. It is only specifically the Mickey Mouse hat that gives the head the same profile of Mickey Mouse with round ears that Disney has a trademark on.
The thing is: pipes and deerstalker hats existed long before Sherlock Holmes, and their association with him as a detective can’t be controlled. The Mickey Mouse silhouette hat is a wholly different thing.