A little over a week ago, I wrote (in Item #3),

As the capper on a really bad year for Disney, Mickey Mouse finally loses its copyright protection on Jan. 1, 2024, and goes into the public domain. Disney unethically used its lobbying power to use its iconic founding rodent to persuade the U.S. Congress to extend copyright protection beyond all reason. Disney’s monopoly over Mickey will end95 years after his debut in the short film “Steamboat Willie,” long, long after the original copyright protection would have expired based on the correct theory that once an artist has gleaned a reasonable benefit and profit from a creation, it benefits the culture and society to be able to use the work to spark innovation and new uses for the original work.

As Carnac the Great would say, “Wrong, Ethics-Breath!”

Disney still has its hooks into Mickey, as the company continues to warp U.S. intellectual property law, setting the precedents for other properties to avoid the public domain far longer than is healthy for the culture. Yes, the original Mickey of 1928’s trailblazing Disney cartoon “Steamboat Willie” (above) has lost its copyright, but not this Mickey,

…or this Mickey,

or this Mickey,

or this one,

…meaning that, for all intents and purposes, Mickey is still protected by copyrights and trademarks, as this diagram explains…

But trying to “copy, share or build” on the 100-year-old Mickey is still fraught with legal peril, as Disney might decide that what you built onto “Steamboat Willie” Mickey is actually one of the myriad still-protected evolutionary versions of Mickey that has appeared since 1928.

“What is going into the public domain is this particular appearance in this particular film,” Kembrew McLeod, a communications professor and intellectual property scholar at the University of Iowa, told NPR. Meanwhile, the Mickey Mouse trademark is as strong as ever. “Trademark law has no end,” Harvard Law School professor Ruth Okediji explained. Disney and other corporations use trademarks to protect brands, logos and names, and as long as the mark remains distinctive in the supply of goods and services, the owner of the trademark keeps it.

“This effective undermining of the public domain by allowing trademark law to effectively extend the life of a copyrighted work” is a longstanding distortion of what copyright limits were supposed to eventually allow, Okediji says, adding, “and it’s my hope that either Congress or the courts will restore the full balance between the protection of creativity and the protection of the public domain, which is also the protection of creativity.”

Well, she better wish upon a star for that one, because Disney has used its wealth, power and influence to keep Congress out of its business for decades, and there’s little reason to believe that a company that owns ABC News among other companies is going to lose its grip over legislators.

***

Post Script: The NPR report on Mickey’s legal status also contained this smoking gun evidence of the kinds of reporters our supposedly non-partisan public news network is hiring: “But the cartoon creature who stars in the animated short Steamboat Willie isn’t a lot like the Mickey we know today. He’s more rascally and rough. His roots in the blackface minstrel shows of the time are more apparent.”

Sure. Mickey Mouse is racist. Like everything else….