In A Couple Of Weeks Mickey Will Be Free*; And Our Public Domain Game Jam Will Be Open
from the it's-public-domain-time-mickey-mouse! dept
It’s that time… Get ready for the Gaming Like It’s 1928! public domain game jam! The game jam, like all our public domain game jams, runs from January 1st through January 31st, and we’re eager to see what kinds of games, both digital and analog, you’ll make by building on newly public domain works. As always we’ll have awards in six different categories: best analog game, best digital game, best adaptation, best visuals, best remix, and best deep cut.
In January 2019, work in the US from 1923 entered the public domain. It was the first time in decades that works in the US had entered the public domain, as certain copyright interests, led by the Walt Disney Company, had continually pushed out the term of copyright again and again and again.
A while back Tom Bell coined the term the “Mickey Mouse Curve” to describe how copyright extensions seemed to keep happening just before Mickey Mouse would be entering the public domain.
However, in part because of widespread activism and the calling out of this curve, the legacy copyright industries admitted in the late teens that they were pretty much done with copyright term extension and that, finally, Mickey Mouse might enter the public domain. 2019 was the first year in decades (thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act two decades earlier) that anything went into the public domain: works from 1923.
At the time, we launched our very first public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1923. We’ve done one every year since then. Here are the 1924, 1925, 1926, and 1927 versions. But this year is the big one.
The very first Mickey Mouse short, Steamboat Willie, was released in 1928. Leaving aside that Steamboat Willie itself was a clear play on the film Steamboat Bill that also came out in 1928 and used the song Steamboat Bill from 1911, it’s pretty incredible that this one short from 1928 was the basis on which so much culture and content was locked up.
Until… just a few weeks from now. And, so we’re certainly expecting a few Mickey-themed games for the game jam this year, and we welcome them all.
Our friends over at Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain have put together a nice guide to what it means for the 1928 Mickey to be in the public domain, which includes explanations of what you can and cannot do with Mickey. It includes a lovely graphical representation that you might like:
There are, of course, lots of other works entering the public domain on January 1st, and we’re always excited to see what interesting and unique works people find and remix for use in the submitted games. Copyright Lately has a good starter list for some of the many other works entering the public domain. It includes things like the Peter Pan play (which has a tricky copyright history as it was performed long before 1928, but not officially published until then).
We know that John Oliver got a bit of a head start on using Mickey Mouse a bit early, and as far as I know, Disney’s lawyers (for once!) actually sat on their hands and did nothing about it. But, on January 1st all of you will be able to use Mickey and lots of other newly public domain works, and we hope that you’ll try to come up with some games for our jam.
If you’re looking for inspiration, please check some of the earlier game jams, each of which have the various winners listed, and check out our spotlight posts for last year’s winners. And we look forward to what you’ll be creating this time, whether or not it includes some variation of Mickey. Head on over to the game jam page on Itch.io to sign up and see all the rules and details.
* As explained above, Mickey is only partially free, as new works must be based on the original Mickey, not later updates, and you have to make sure there are no trademark issues, such that anyone would think that your use was an official Disney offering.
Filed Under: analog games, copyright, culture, game jam, gaming like it's 1928, mickey mouse, peter pan, public domain, public domain game jam, video games
Companies: disney
Comments on “In A Couple Of Weeks Mickey Will Be Free*; And Our Public Domain Game Jam Will Be Open”
Putting out an UNOFFICIAL disclaimer on a Mickey Mouse game that clearly wasn’t designed by Disney should do the trick.
On Jan 1st, Public Domain Mickey will be so fine, be so fine he’ll blow our minds.
He’s taken us by our hearts so let’s take him by the hand… into a world of artistic freedom
The problem with your games is, they are all very Mickey Mouse.
Mickey Mouse tentacle porn sim when
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Hardly a surprise to see this depraved quote from another degenerate TechDirt reader. This site is run by and for very sick people.
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I guess that explains why you keep sticking around.
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Your joke detector needs a major overhaul, before your mistaken outrage causes you suffer an aneurysm.
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I know! Just wait until Mickey gets Mini pregnant and she needs an abortion. You’ll be apoplectic.
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I, for one, would actually like to see Mickey transition into Minnie (Minnie’s earliest form is from 1928 as well). That’s the kind of thing I’d love to see!
Re: Re: Re:2
If the GOP could read, they’d be very upset.
Re: Re: Re:3
Now there’s a game that to boost the blood pressure of the right, Mickeys Journey to becoming Minnie, can you navigate Mickey through the problems of transition.
Re: Re: Re:3
If the GOP could read, they’d possess a rudimentary intelligence, and we wouldn’t have gotten into this pickle in the first place!
Re: Re: Re:2
That would be a wonderful production. You don’t need to stick with the Duckberg character set – heck, this is Mickey/Minnie’s family minus the nephews (they’re too young to understand, poor micelets) – so you could make any number of Mickey Mouse into Minnie Mouse movies without once introducing the Donald Duck family, even as Sunday roasts, let alone the other usual suspects.
I fully expect to see a game where Steamboat Willy bludgeons people with lawsuits for the offense of impugning his intellectual property.
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Nobody gives a flying fuck.
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And yet you went out of your way to comment.
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You cared enough to come to Techdirt, click on the article and leave a comment. Merely by typing the words you did, you revealed yourself a liar.
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Hey antidirt! Good to see you’re still kicking around and angry that copyright doesn’t last forever minus a day.
Paul Duffy’s got a nice warm seat saved for you!
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He’s so anti-Techdirt, let’s call him ‘Ludditeclean’, the exact opposite of what we stand for.
Hell, I’ve known Amish and Mennonites that’ve adapted better to the society around them, than this joker.
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Personally I’m alright with calling him a gutless lying sack of shit, but you do you…
Oh Mickey, you’re so fine
You’re so fine, you blow my mind
Hey Mickey, hey Mickey
..
You’ve been around all night and that’s a little long
You think you’ve got the right but I think you’ve got it wrong
Does it still count as a game if my entire plan is to have the printers who print things for the afterlife print steamboat willie on flash paper to be burned?
I gotta think Willie showing up en mass would really piss off Walt.
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No, no, you’ll just have to wait. Free Willy doesn’t enter the public domain until 2088.
40 years and no more
There is NO fricking reason for it.
The only ones making REAL money would be the corps.
BUT, if you really want fun.
There are CR on different parts and things in your car, AND THOSE have been extended also. And if you had Everything before 1970-75, RELEASED, it would be a savings to Every car corp in the USA.
Other corps like it also, besides the movie/music industry.
Re: Too long
20 years after a work is published tops. No “date of death + bazillion years” bs.
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And no “copyright after death”, either—a copyright term dies with the owner thereof.
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You wouldn’t want people to get murdered or “accidentally have their brake lines cut” just because they made the next Legend of Star Wars whatever mass popular thing solo, and someone wants to profit off of it without a license. I think a fixed term is probably better for the safety of creators. But that fixed term should be in line with patents.
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I could live with a fixed term of 4 hours.
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And if a creator dies of a heart attack two years after self-publishing a best-selling novel, what incentive does his still-extant copyright give him to create? Because that’s the problem with “post-death” copyright terms: They’re not for a creator that died—they’re for greedy motherfuckers who are still alive and aching to exploit the dead creator’s work for profit.
Re: Re: Re:3 creative incentive to feed family
If that was his way for providing for his family, I should like to think that they can enjoy the remainder of a reasonable term. If there are 14 or 20 years left, that might even get the kids through college.
My objection is to unreasonably long terms. The original 14 years seems reasonable. Maybe extend it another 14 if the author is still making money. But 50 years or more is way excessive. The original bargain was limited time of rights in return for giving to the public.
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Okay but why though. The author is dead. Copyright still being on his book would give him no incentive to create because he no longer has the ability to create. His heirs could still sell his book even if it were in the public domain. For what reason should they be able to keep his work locked up in copyright for another decade-plus other than wanting to use copyright as a welfare system?
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Because it can take some time after initial creation to get the work to market, and then creative works don’t pay fully upfront but pay as sales trickle in. If someone is near death, allowing the heirs to continue to profit for the remaining 15 years out of a 20 year copyright term could incentivize that person to keep creating.
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I see no reason to keep a copyright term going after an artist’s death because the artist is dead. The heirs can continue to profit by selling copies of the work that are “estate-approved” and therefore closest to the original vision of the artist. A work being in the public domain doesn’t stop the heirs of its creator(s) from selling copies of the work itself—it only means it has to compete with “free” (or with other people selling copies of that work). Shit, man, Shakespeare’s works have been in the public domain for a long damn time—I can go download all of his plays right now without legal consequence!—and that still hasn’t stopped book publishers from selling their own copies.
Re: Re: Re:7
The incentive would be before the work is created: the creator in bad health could count on some income trickling in for heirs after death and therefore it would be more worth it to create the work. In the extreme case, a writer expects to die in a few months and there’s no way the book would make it through editing and publication in that time so under your policy, it wouldn’t be sold under copyright at all. Agents wouldn’t even represent dying people for that reason. Obviously heirs could sell works out of copyright but they wouldn’t have a monopoly on sale so they couldn’t command the same price and not sure anyone gives a shit if a work is “estate-approved”.
Similarly, a person living longer shouldn’t extend the duration of copyright. So I think life+ makes no sense. If we invent an immortality pill, that shouldn’t kill the public domain.
A different argument for letting copyright remain after death to complete a fixed term is to compare creative works to other works. If I work hard in my last years to create a bunch of valuable physical objects and I die before selling all of them, my heirs get the remaining ones to sell. My property isn’t liquidated and distributed to the public – it passes on to my heirs. Why should creative works not follow the same principle?
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Again: What would stop the heirs from selling copies of the creator’s work if the work falls into the public domain after the creator’s death? The only real issue I see here is that the heirs may not want to lose the monopoly they have over the work in question—but keeping the work locked up in copyright for years after the death of the creator beneifts no one but the heirs. Part of the point of copyright was to created a limited-time monopoly that would eventually see a copyrighted work fall into the public domain. The heirs can still sell copies of a public domain work. But I can’t see any good reason to let them exploit that monopoly for themselves when the person to whom that monopoly was granted is dead.
The writer could ask for another writer to receive co-credit for their work on the book and a contract could be drawn up that says the co-credited writer will give up half the book’s overall profits to the heirs of the soon-to-be dead writer. Otherwise: The heirs could still work with the publishing company to publish that book and make as much bank as possible with it. The idea of turning copyright into a welfare system for a successful artist’s family (or a corporation) while extending a copyright term past the death of that artist doesn’t sit well with me; your arguments aren’t convincing enough for me to reconsider that position.
Simultaneously believing that “life-plus” is nonsensical as the length of a copyright term and “life-plus but only if the author dies in the middle of the copyright term“ is perfectly sensical puts forth an amazing case of cognitive dissonance.
The current “life-plus” standard means that if an artist who paints a work of art today dies tomorrow, that work remains under copyright for another 70 years—all so someone else can exploit that work for their own gain while the dead artist never sees a dime. Y’know, because they’re dead. And whether that “plus” in “life-plus” is a static number like 70 years or a variable number that depends on when in a static-length copyright term an artist dies is irrelevant: They’re both “life-plus”, but one of them involves one step of math.
Life ends the work of a creator. They have no more incentive to create because they can no longer create. For what reason should other people be allowed to exploit that creator’s work for their own personal gain to the exclusion of the public domain, regardless of the length of the “plus” in “life-plus”?
They already do: The rights to sell a creative work tend to fall to the heirs of an artist. But in re: the physical objects, the copyright would largely apply to the appearance and design of the objects rather than the objects in and of themselves. Mass production of the objects using public domain design documents wouldn’t prevent the heirs from being able to sell the physical objects that the creator made themselves.
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This is something that copyright term fans have never been able to explain away. If anything, the heirs of a content creator can continue to market their stuff as official merchandise, and benefit from having that prestige attached to the content. They don’t magically lose that ability when the copyright expires.
But then the best explanation that they’ve offered is that “life+ terms incentivize corporations to not murder content creators in order to seize their copyrights”, as if laws against murder didn’t exist anymore. And considering that explanation came from John Smith, well… that says a lot about the quality of argumentation from the pro-IP team.
Re: Re: Re:5 heirs inherit
Because that was his way of earning income to support his family.
If I receive payment in money, it can continue to draw interest even after I die. If I accept stock as compensation for my work, the dividends properly go to my heirs.
If I have a right to royalties for my writings, my heirs ought to receive what I owned when I died. The public still gets the benefit of its bargain: the work continues to exist and will pass into the public domain, whether or not I continue to consume oxygen.
Disney clearly intends to leverage trademark law going forward to protect Steamboat Willie. Thats why they made him the logo for all their animated films starting about 10 years back.
So yeah, his copyright expired. But Trademark is forever.
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The Supreme Court already refused the idea that trademarks can extend copyright terms by even a day. I doubt even the current SCOTUS, Trumpian as it is, would be willing to turn IP law on its head by overturning that precedent. So Disney can trademark troll if it wants, but it still can’t stop Steamboat Willie from entering the public domain in two weeks.