January 1st is not just lentils and cotechino, nor just good resolutions for the new year. Every year at midnight, while we toast and exchange greetings, we also celebrate the Public Domain Daythat is, the day on which copyright also expires which for almost a century has covered characters and works known throughout the world: it means that anyone can copy it, distribute it, modify it or insert it into new creations. And therefore it becomes possible to use certain characters or certain stories as a starting point for new works without the sword of Damocles of copyright infringement.
In 2024, for example, the oldest representation of Mickey Mouse, that of «Steamboat Willie». And with him Peter Pan, Tigger and dozens of period books and films. And this year it’s the turn of the sensual Betty Boop — the two-dimensional character who embodied the spirit of flapper of the Roaring Twenties -, of the famous Dinsey dog Pluto (or rather, the first representation, with its original name which was different from how we know it) and of the first film adaptation of the novel by the German Erich Maria Remarque «Nothing new on the Western Front». As well as dozens of other works for the big screen and musicals.
Yes, but why now and why them? What opens the gates of copyright is the US law which regulates copyright. As the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University explains – which every year draws up the list of “liberated” works -, initially works published in 1930 they were supposed to enter the public domain in 1986, after a period of just 56 years. But thanks to an extension the limit was postponed first to 2006, then again a second time. The second extension expired in 2019, when works that have defined a part of Western culture entered the public domain for the first time. Since then, therefore, they have been counted 95 years old from the first publication of a work before the copyright expires.
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