On one hand, we have the jailbreak of Steamboat Willie into the public domain despite the best efforts of Disney. I’m not worried about it either way; I generated the image using Deepai. If Disney is upset about it, I have no problem taking it down.

There’s a great write-up on the 1928 version of Mickey over at the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and you can see what you can do with the character and not through some of the links there.

So we have that aspect, where the Mickey Mouse Protection Act in 1998 allowed for the copyright protection further. As Lessig pointed out in Free Culture, much of the Disney franchise was built on the public domain where they copyrighted their own versions of works already in the public domain.

Personally, it doesn’t matter too much to me. I’ve never been a fan of Mickey Mouse, I’m not a big fan of Disney, and I have read much of the original works that Disney built off of and I like them better. You can find most of them at Gutenberg.org.

In other news, OpenAI has admitted that it can’t train it’s AI’s without copyrighted works.

Arguably, if there was more content in the public domain, OpenAI could train it’s AIs on stuff that is in the public domain. Then there’s the creative commons licensed content that could also be used but… well, that’s inconvenient.

So on one hand, we have a corporation making sure people don’t overstep with using Mickey of the Public Domain, which has happened, and on the other hand we have a corporation complaining that copyright is too restrictive.

On one hand, we have a corporation defending what it has under copyright (which people think went into the public domain but didn’t, just that version of Mickey), and on the other hand we have a corporation defending it’s wanton misuse of copyrighted materials.

Clearly something is not right with how we view copyright or innovation. Navigating that with lawyers seems like a disservice to everyone, but here we are.