The Mouse that Roared Belongs to Us All

 

Well, it finally happened.

Teaching about copyright law in communication classes is always interesting. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to protect intellectual property, with an unspecified reasonable time limit, which has led, over the years, to a tangle of patent and trademark and copyright law.

But throughout much of the late 20th century into the first two decades of the 21st, there was a reliable rule—the length of copyright would be extended whenever the mouse was endangered. When Steamboat Willy approached public domain, the residents of what Nicki Haley calls "the most privileged nursing home in the country" would shake themselves into action. (Nikki and I don’t agree on much, but she has a point--the quote was specifically about the Senate and it applies well there).

Nikki Haley campaigns in 2024 in Council Bluffs Iowa. Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Matt Johnson of Omaha, Nebraska, I am assuming an actual human photographer.

Anyway, I don’t think the failure to extend copyrights is a sign of our historically do-nothing, rabble-rousing bunch of political extremists in the current Congress, even if Disney is a favorite punching bag of the far right these days. It's just that more that almost 100 years on, Disney doesn’t need Steamboat anymore.

Of course, the other creative works that feature later interactions of Mickey Mouse are still very much protected. “What is going into the public domain is this particular appearance in this particular film,” said Kembrew McLeod, a communications professor at the University of Iowa, quoted in a new story by NPR.

And Mickey Mouse is still protected by a Trademark—Trademarks don’t expire, they last as long as a company can protect the name of its good or service (it’s a fuzzy area of law, eventually a term can enter public domain if courts rule people treat it as a common term—thus “aspirin” is no longer “Aspirin” because it has entered the common tongue).

This whole area of law can sometime be very Mikey Mouse. There, Disney, come after me—a common language use of a Trademark term, but not one, I hope, that the powers that be in corporate America will care about.

Anyway, Steamboat Willy, the first cartoon of Mickey, is free for you to embellish and use as you wish. And I have to update my copyright lectures. Again. And copyright is very tangled--just listen to Tessa Violet, a singer-songwriter, in a video seven years ago trying to explain music copyright:

Copyright is an interesting area of media law that is often shaped and reshaped by technology. The original idea is that a creator should benefit from their creation because that fosters more creativity—gives painters and writers and musicians an economic incentive to toil away in the hopes that something will become popular and enrich them.

And it sometimes happens, although the history of intellectual property is rife with examples of how corporations get inexperienced creators to sign away the rights to their creations.

The computer age has long complicated a creator’s power to control their creations, too. As a professor of mine once noted (it was in graduate school over 30 years ago, and sorry, I don’t have the notes to accurately track down who said it), to a computer, information is a “liquid.” It flows easily from place to place, it tends to be hard to contains, it seeps out a leaks everywhere.

In ye olden days, a creator crafted an artifact. A musician, if she were lucky, had a “record.” The manuscript of the Great American Novel was on typed pages (we’re in the modern era, in the 19th century, hand-written pages) stored in files. A photograph was a “print” from a “negative,” and not that easy to filch or move from place to place. Films were recorded on celluloid.

The computer dispenses with the artifact. My words here are digital blips, easy to copy perfectly, easy to download and move from file to file (don’t you dare!).

Add to that the Steamboat Willy complexity of corporate America lobbying over time to extend the limits of their copyrights, and you have an active, difficult and contentious area of law.

But the heart of the idea is still important. Creators are important. Some person thought of this and crafted it, even if “it,” these days, are a series of bytes rather than an analog thing.

Until, of course, now.

It would have rocked the copyright world a few years ago if Steamboat Willy churned into public domain, but it feels like more of an asterisk, an afterthought, a tiny curiosity now.

The real energy is: Who owns AI creations? And what can artificial intelligence use as it reprocesses huge amounts of data into new computer files? These days, creators don’t need to get their hands dirty, and they may not have hands at all. For example, late last year, a pretty bird appeared on social media to herald the holiday season, but as Snopes points out, it's not a bird at all, just the AI idea of a bird:

"Ho ho ho, humans! The joke's on you. This chicken-headed monster is not a cardinal at all. There's no bird, no tree, no limb, no snow. It's all in my mind. Insincerely, AI." (image from Snopes article debunking the image).

The New York Times has acted to protect its works, suing Microsoft and other corporations over their AI systems synthesizing Times stories. The Times is a slightly ironic champion of human creativity, having had over the years some interesting legal entanglements over how it has treated freelance creators, but I applaud old media here.

You go, grey lady. Stand up for us who stand up as me move through our lives, those of us hairless apes with opposable thumbs who try to make new stuff.

We don’t have AI’s ability to crunch mountains of data. But AI doesn’t have our thoughts, emotions, feelings or need to be protected so that it’s creativity can be rewarded.

An ongoing, long-term theme (especially in the music realm) has been the struggle of creators to benefit from what they have created. That benefit, legitimately, has always had to be balanced against the larger needs of the community, which is why copyright works do lapse into the public domain eventually.

Hundreds of years after Shakespeare’s death, it’s OK for Taylor Swift to sing about Romeo and Juliet, even if she gets the story completely wrong, because copyright does not and should not apply to those long-dead and never alive fictional lovers.

On the other hand, we’re already being flooded with words and images that don’t represent human creativity, but rather a synthesized, synthetic reality based on the massive database of creativity.

It creates numerous challenges. I do think AI is here to stay and that it has numerous benefits for us, but I also think it needs careful development and guardrails to protect the humans who originally sent that mouse down the river in a weird 1920s cartoon.

It’s not time for us to give up on our own creativity in frustration over AI’s mechanical perfection.

Or, so I hope. Steamboat Willy, you seem rather quaint now. But my hope is that what we humans create now doesn’t too quickly seem the same. The old order of copyright law has passed down the river, but the ideal of a creator benefiting form creation shouldn’t sail off with it.