Public Domain Day: Preserving the digital realm is as fraught as ever
How much will be around in 95 years time?
At last, the mouse is free (Ts & Cs applying). After decades of sending lawyers after anyone daring to use the sacred image of Mickey unauthorised, including a childcare centre, Disney has finally conceded defeat.
Ninety-five years after its release, the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie, which was originally destined for the public domain in 1984 and 2004 before Disney won extensions, can now be copied, adapted and offered for free. Indeed, a horror film teaser, a game and music videos featuring the iconic rodents have already appeared.
Other works freed up as their US copyrights expired on 1st January, Public Domain Day, include DH Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, AA Milne's House at Pooh Corner, and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. As with Shakespeare's plays and old masters, anyone will now be free to produce their own derivative creations without an official nod.
Public Domain Day is an unofficial but reasonably widely observed celebration of copyright expiration. It was initiated a couple of decades ago by domain activists including the Canadian Wallace McLean, and was enthusiastically taken up by US lawyer Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons.
Copyright laws differ between nations, and so rights expiration is not universal. For example, Lady Chatterley's Lover and other novels by DH Lawrence remain copyrighted in the UK until 2039, 99 years after the author's death.
Many other caveats apply too. In the case of Mickey and Minnie, it's only representations from Steamboat Willie that are out of copyright. Try to adapt later versions and Disney's lawyers will be breathing down your neck, as per usual. Plus, the company still holds a trademark on use of Mickey as a brand identifier and a corporate mascot, meaning that mouse use cases remain restricted.
Rights issues have been a hot topic since the arrival of the web, and the idealogical tug of war between information being inherently free and proprietary rights continues unabated.
All told, though, it's amazing that the original film still exists to have its rights fought over. The BBC famously taped over almost 100 episodes of Dr Who to reuse the videotape, and many other examples exist of a work's value only being recognised once it's too late. But paper and celluloid could prove to be a lot more durable than digital media. Given that many formats used just 20 years ago are almost unreadable now, together with a relentless focus on the here and now, will the latest artistic creations uploaded to YouTube or X be around in even 10 years' time?
The online landscape is unstable. Whole websites can disappear in the blink of an eye while organisations dedicated to preserving them for perpetuity struggle under the weight, like Archive.org which spends much of its time fundraising to cover running costs of its server farm, which now houses more than 20 petabytes of data, and fending off legal challenges from publishers.
Project Gutenberg, which digitises and makes freely available books in the public domain, no doubt faces its own battles against the exponential data wave and hosting requirements. Noble as they are, long term, it's hard to see these ventures winning.
Elsewhere, works that were once available for free disappear behind paywalls, scientific publishers sue open access sites while pumping up subscription prices year-on-year, and others form deals with the big cloud companies.
For self-publishers and bloggers, domain names expire, links rot, platforms go bust, content disappears. A huge percentage of the early web is now unavailable.
Much information will be compressed into LLMs and regurgitated by AI as 'knowledge' (copyright claims notwithstanding), but protecting and maintaining the accessibility of original thought and creativity seems as fraught as ever.