Copyright and Public Domain: An Updated Primer

Wonderful news: On January 1, 2020, after a period of 20 years—during which copyright expirations were frozen—a treasure trove of materials copyrighted in the United States in 1924 finally entered the public domain. The delay was due to the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which took effect on January 1, 1999. In it, US Congress retroactively extended the copyright term of works dating from 1923. Those works finally entered the public domain on January 1, 2019; next year, if there are no significant changes to the US copyright law, works from 1925 will become available, and so on. (Disney’s Mickey Mouse, a character whose profitable franchise motivated that company’s involvement in major changes to copyright in both 1976 and 1998, will enter the public domain in 2024, 95 years after the company first introduced Mickey in the cartoon short, Steamboat Willie.