The Video Below,

Steamboat Willie has just passed a milestone,

 in 1984, the copyright term for creations from 1928 was 54 years, but a legal extension changed that to 2004, then Disney pushed for an additional 20 years—derisively called the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” by scholars—which brings us to its release in 2024, and on January 1st. Mickey and thousands of books, films, plays, artworks, sound recordings, and more entered the public domain, which means they may be used freely without compensating or needing to obtain permission from the owner, literary heavyweights like W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, 

and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover—among many others—are joined by two of the first “all-talking” films ever released, Lights of New York and In Old Arizona, and of course children’s book characters, like Peter Pan and the Darling children, who first appeared in a play in 1904, then in book from 1911, in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up—now in the public domain because it wasn’t “published” for copyright in the U.S. until 1928, 

and, of course, there’s Christopher Robin and his friends in the Seven Acre Wood. E.H. Sheperd’s quintessential illustrations in A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner introduced us to Tigger, to explore all of the ‘new’ material now available from the Duke University’s Centre for the Study of the Public Domain, take a look at all that is now copyright free.