A Mouse is Loose

New Year’s Day. The day most of us still have (probably) not broken any New Year’s resolutions. A new calendar. A fresh start. And the day each year that a whole bunch of copyrights expire. This year’s treasure trove of works that have been protected since their origin way back in 1928 include Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman, and Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It. As a group, all these works are, by definition, old. Like random items in a recently opened time capsule or elements of a museum exhibit titled something like “Life and Art Between World Wars,” all are still relevant, still worthwhile, but generally not an integral part of our current lives or culture. Except…

…Mickey. The big reveal is that the earliest Mickey Mouse has now also entered public domain—the Mickey Mouse of Steamboat Willie fame. The original Mickey with no gloves, who looked a bit more mousey and a little more lanky than later Mickey iterations. Not the Mickey of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Fantasia. That Mickey is from 1940 and will not loose its copyright for another 16 years by my count.

But Mickey exists on a continuum. From the earliest Mickey to today’s version, the mouse has been tweaked, but, IMHO, they all look about the same. Where do you draw the line on what drawing of a mouse has a copyright and what version doesn’t? Especially when said mouse character went onto become the brand mascot for an entire entertainment empire. (Oh Steamboat Willie, you have gone so far and accomplished so much.) As this article in the Washington Post explains, it is tricky.

If any version of that mouse was in my house, I would know who it was immediately. And so would my cats. So good luck to Disney, who worked very hard back in the 1990s to make sure they controlled Mickey’s likeness for as long as possible, trying to keep that mouse under wraps. Now that one version of Mickey has been set free, will the rest be far behind. Who knows? It is complicated.