The beginning of the new year marks the celebration of a day that may not be well known to many — Public Domain Day. However, this year’s event is particularly significant. After numerous legal battles, “Steamboat Willie,” a 1928 Walt Disney short featuring Mickey Mouse, is now in the public domain.
This doesn’t mean that the current version of Mickey Mouse can be used freely. However, the version of Mickey Mouse as depicted in the “Steamboat Willie” animation is now part of the public domain.
Every January 1, various old works, including literature, music, and art, enter the public domain, meaning that no one has exclusive rights to the work any longer. While some works are created to be public domain from the beginning, copyrighted works can enter the public domain due to copyright expiration. Copyright laws vary from country to country, but the concept of the public domain is why there exists a Winnie the Pooh slasher film (which has a 3% rating on Rotten Tomatoes…), or a queer “Great Gatsby” retelling.
Already, there are several horror movie and video game adaptations announced that will feature the “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey Mouse. Generally, creating art just because one can does not always lead to great works (as evidenced by the Rotten Tomatoes rating for “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey”), but these situations resemble a YouTube comments section: everyone wants to be “first.”
Mickey Mouse has already been reimagined in media such as the TV show South Park, where a character named Mr. Mouse, an obvious parody of Mickey, has been depicted as an egomaniac obsessed with ownership. Depictions like this can be protected under fair use doctrine, in which certain actions that might seem like copyright violations are legally permissible if they are transformative or satirical in nature (although the determination of this is subjective and can raise legal issues).
Any significant work entering the public domain will attract attention. However, the surplus of surprise “Steamboat Willie” adaptations is also due to Disney’s extensive efforts to prevent this day from occurring.
“Steamboat Willie” was originally slated to enter the public domain in 1984, but Disney successfully lobbied for two different copyright extension acts that extended its copyright for an additional 40 years. Initially, Disney pushed for Congress to pass the Copyright Act of 1976, which postponed the entrance of “Steamboat Willie” and Mickey Mouse into the public domain until 2004. In the 1990s, Disney continued its efforts by lobbying for further extensions, leading to the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which protected “Steamboat Willie” until just a few days ago.
“Many people thought that Disney would continue this fight. But I personally find it unsurprising that this day has finally arrived,” wrote Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at CU Boulder. “It was inevitable. And it would have been both a challenging battle and a public relations nightmare to postpone this yet again.”
Some of Disney’s most iconic works were adapted from public domain stories, such as “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen, or the Brothers Grimm’s stories about Cinderella and Rapunzel. Consequently, critics of Disney viewed its extensive lobbying for copyright extensions as hypocritical, with some even referring to the 1998 law as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.”
On social media, enthusiastic meme-makers find joy in ridiculing large corporations. It’s like a David vs. Goliath scenario, where ordinary individuals on the internet want to feel like they can stand up to invincible corporations. The internet was amused when someone exploited Twitter’s mishandled blue check system to impersonate pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and declare that insulin was free. It’s similar to when the Bernie Sanders mittens meme went viral, and even an Amazon corporate Twitter account posted its own Bernie meme. When users pointed out that Sanders is one of Amazon’s most vocal critics, the meme was swiftly deleted.
Therefore, the “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey Mouse seems to be omnipresent at the moment. In the crypto world, some individuals are already creating “Steamboat Willie” NFTs, a concept that is unlikely to lead to any fraudulent behavior. And among cynical meme-makers, we’re witnessing AI-generated images of Mickey Mouse involved in 9/11, Mickey Mouse confessing to the murder of JFK, and numerous other extreme representations of Mickey that cannot be repeated on this website. These memes are not created because the creators endorse the idea of Mickey Mouse perpetrating a terrorist attack, but simply because they can.
This trend builds on a pre-existing meme in which people use generative AI to create the most extreme representations of copyrighted media, such as a pregnant Sonic the Hedgehog or Hatsune Miku attending the January 6 riots. However, this time, there are no restrictions on the creation of Mickey memes, as long as the creator explicitly references only the “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey Mouse.
Despite the fact that “Steamboat Willie” is the first meme of 2024, the amusement derived from poking fun at Disney is likely to be short-lived. And if individuals aren’t cautious, they might still encounter repercussions from the mouse.
“We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright, and we will work to safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters,” Disney stated in a December announcement.
