This emerging copyright reform coalition flexed its lobbying muscles in 2012 when it overwhelmingly defeated an Internet filtering bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act. That includes big companies like Google, but it also includes grassroots communities like Wikipedia editors and Reddit users. The rise of the Internet and its remix culture means that a lot of people now benefit from a growing public domain in ways that weren't true in 1998. Also a wide popular movement that they can tie it into." "There are large business interests now on the anti-expansion side. "There's now a well-organized, grassroots lobby against copyright expansion," Grimmelmann tells Ars. The reason was simple, Grimmelmann argues: they knew they weren't going to win. "It's not something we are pursuing," an RIAA spokesman told me. But the political climate for copyright legislation has changed radically over the last 20 years.Ī year ago, Ars Technica broke the news that three of the nation's most powerful rights holder groups in the country, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Authors Guild, were not even going to try to pass legislation extending copyrights. Until recently, I assumed that the same interest groups would try to extend copyright terms again in 2018. So even though the arguments for longer copyright terms weren't very strong, they won the day in Congress. "There was not a single argument that actually can stand up to any kind of reasonable analysis," Karjala said. But a small minority of famous works from the 1920s and 1930s were still generating significant revenues in the 1990s. Retroactively extending copyright terms meant an enormous windfall for the companies and families that owned the copyrights. Most copyrighted works become commercially worthless within a decade or two. Internet activism made another extension untenable "We never had megacharacters in the same way" prior to the 1920s, he says. James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at Cornell Law School, tells Ars that this is an uncharted area of law because licensing practices for modern characters are "so much more intensive and so much more comprehensive now" than in the 1920s and 1930s.
But Disney will still own copyrights for later incarnations of the character-and it will also own Mickey-related trademarks. After 2024, Disney won't have any copyright protection for Mickey's original incarnation. The expiration of copyrights for characters like Mickey Mouse and Batman will raise tricky new legal questions. The copyrights to Superman, Batman, Disney's Snow White, and early Looney Tunes characters will all fall into the public domain between 20. On January 1, 2024, we'll see the expiration of the copyright for Steamboat Willie-and with it Disney's claim to the film's star, Mickey Mouse. It will be followed by The Great Gatsby in January 2021 and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in January 2022. Next January, George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue will fall into the public domain. Congress left the existing law in place, and so those 1923 copyrights expired on schedule this morning.Īnd assuming Congress doesn't interfere, more works will fall into the public domain each January from now on. Many people-including me-expected another fight over copyright extension in 2018. It added 20 years to the terms of older works, keeping 1923 works locked up until 2019. But then Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. In 1998, works published in 1922 or earlier were in the public domain, with 1923 works scheduled to expire at the beginning of 1999. It's the first time this has happened in 21 years. Everyone now has the right to republish them or adapt them for use in new works. As the ball dropped over Times Square last night, all copyrighted works published in 1923 fell into the public domain (with a few exceptions).
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