Mickey Mouse should help other characters to escape copyright

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A mouse has never been trapped for so long. Walt Disney’s pioneering 1928 sound cartoon Steamboat Willie finally escaped copyright this week, 95 years after first being shown. The film brings with it the original Mickey Mouse, a black and white rodent who whistles jauntily at the wheel of the ship.

Other works have also entered the public domain in the US for the first time: DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. But none of the characters is worth as much, or has played such a role in copyright law, as Disney’s (and now the public’s) mouse.

Mickey has not scampered off entirely. You are now allowed to mount your own production of Steamboat Willie, but make sure that the main character does not resemble later white-gloved versions of Mickey, which remain in copyright. A further legal warning: do not give the impression that your version has anything to do with Disney by breaching its trademarks.

It is still a welcome liberation, given that copyright terms have been lengthened so often for the rent-seeking estates of authors, songwriters and inventors. The US Copyright Act of 1790 permitted up to 28 years of exclusivity “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” but it has been stretched, notoriously in the 1998 law dubbed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

Pity all those characters, locked up in their copyright towers by the law. Copyright does not prevent royalty-paying adaptations of works including Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Orlando. But the intention of the limited monopoly was, as the Supreme Court once noted, “to motivate the creative activity of authors and inventors”, not to facilitate an intellectual property industry.

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