The new year marks the funniest holidays you might not know about: Public Sector Day. But this year’s celebration is very special. After years of legal battles, “Steamboat Willie,” a 1928 Walt Disney short featuring Mickey Mouse, is now in the public domain.
No, that doesn’t mean you can take the Mickey Mouse character as we know him today and do whatever you want. But Mickey Mouse as he appears in “Steamboat Willie” cartoon? This is public domain, baby.
Every January 1st, a bunch of old works of literature, music, and art enter the public domain, meaning that no one has exclusive rights to the work anymore. Some works are created to be in the public domain from the start, but previously copyrighted works become public domain because copyright can expire over time. Copyright laws differ from country to country, but to put it simply, the concept of the public domain is why it exists Winnie the Pooh slasher movie (which has a 3% rating. on Rotten Tomatoes…), or a queer “Great Gatsby” retold.
Already, there have been many horror movie and video game adaptations have been announced that will include a version of Mickey Mouse from “Steamboat Willie”. Generally, “because I can” isn’t an inspiration that creates great art (see, again, the Rotten Tomatoes score on “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey”), but these are the situations in which life imitates unity of YouTube comments: everyone wants to be “first”.
Mickey Mouse has already been remixed in some media, such as the TV show South Park, which created an egomaniacal character of Mr. Mouse who is obsessed with having everything. Mr. Mouse is an obvious copy of Mickey, but illustrations like this can be protected under a different subset of copyright law. Under the fair use doctrine, some behavior that might appear to be copyright violations is legally permissible if it is transformative or satirical (but of course, these are subjective parameters, which is a whole other can of legal worms).
Any worthwhile project entering the public domain will attract attention. But part of why there’s so much hype about “Steamboat Willie” adaptations is because Disney worked so hard to prevent that day from arriving.
“Steamboat Willie” was supposed to enter the public domain in 1984, but Disney was able to extend that copyright for another 40 years through extensive government lobbying for two separate copyright extension acts. First, Disney pushed Congress to pass the Copyright Act of 1976, which delayed the debut of “Steamboat Willie” and Mickey Mouse in the public domain until 2004. Through the 1990s, Disney continued to room for further extensions, which gave us the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, making “Steamboat Willie” safe until just a few days ago.
“A lot of people thought Disney would continue this fight. But personally it doesn’t surprise me that this day has finally arrived,” he wrote Casey Fischler, associate professor of computer science at CU Boulder. “It was inevitable. And it would be both a tough fight and a PR nightmare to postpone it again.”
Some of Disney’s most iconic works were adapted from public domain stories, such as Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid or the Brothers Grimm’s stories of Cinderella and Rapunzel. Thus, Disney’s critics saw its extensive lobbying for copyright extension as hypocritical, with some even referring to the 1998 law as “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”.
On social media, avid meme creators derive joy from humiliating large corporations. It’s like a David vs. Goliath situation where random posters want to feel like they, random people on the internet, can actually stand up to untouchable companies. The internet watched with glee as someone abused Twitter’s flawed blue check system to impersonate pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly; and to state that the insulin was free. It’s like when the Bernie Sanders makes a meme it even went viral an Amazon corporate Twitter account posted his own Bernie meme. And when users responded saying that Sanders is one of Amazon’s most vocal critics, the meme was quickly deleted.
So the Mickey Mouse version of “Steamboat Willie” seems to be everywhere right now. Among the crypto folk, some people are already building “Steamboat Willie” NFTs, which is a good idea that will definitely not lead to any scams. And among nihilistic meme creators, we see AI generated images of Mickey Mouse does 9/11Mickey Mouse confessing to JFK’s assassination and many more extreme representations of Mickey that we dare not repeat on this website. People don’t make these memes because they actually support the idea of Mickey Mouse carrying out a terrorist attack, but simply because they can.
This is based on an existing, ongoing meme in which people use genetic artificial intelligence to create the most hideous representations of copyrighted media, such as a pregnant Sonic the Hedgehog or Hatsune Miku attending the January 6th riots. Only this time, there’s actually nothing stopping the Mickey memes, since the creator is only specifically referring to the version of Mickey Mouse that appears in “Steamboat Willie.”
“Steamboat Willie” itself is surprisingly mature material, considering it’s a seven-minute short with no dialogue. While we’re used to seeing Mickey Mouse as a highly sanitized, wholesome figure, the 95-year-old movie “Steamboat Willie” shows a different side of the mouse. Mickey gets hit in the face with cow pee, throws a potato at a parrot, turns a goat into a music box, and pulls the tails of baby pigs to use as instruments. His personality would be better suited to “Tom and Jerry” than “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.”
“Steamboat Willie” may be the first meme of 2024, but the novelty of Disney entertainment will only last so long. And if people aren’t careful, they may face the wrath of the mouse.
“We will, of course, continue to protect our rights to the most up-to-date versions of Mickey Mouse and other copyrighted works and work to protect against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and other iconic characters us. ,” Disney wrote in a statement in December.
