Public Domain Day is coming — here’s what you need to know about characters like Betty Boop; The Beat, December 31, 2025

 Russ Burlingame, The Beat; Public Domain Day is coming — here’s what you need to know about characters like Betty Boop

As big-name characters enter the public domain, they come with asterisks.

"In just two days, when the calendar tips over into 2026, a number of beloved characters and works of art will lose copyright protection in the United States and enter the public domain. While this means you can print and sell your own versions of The Maltese Falcon and Animal Crackers, what’s arguably more important is the way the public domain fosters future creativity. When a character falls into the public domain, anyone can use them in derivative works, allowing for things like Wicked, featuring L. Frank Baum‘s characters from the world of Oz, or Jim, Percival Everett‘s award-winning novel based on the characters from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to exist.

Of course, artists wishing to dip into the public domain for inspiration also have to be careful: while “Rover” is public domain, it’s likely Disney will continue to guard any version of Mickey Mouse’s beloved dog that is named Pluto for another year. Early editions of books featuring characters like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were sometimes rewritten or updated to reflect changing times, meaning that the version of The Secret of the Old Clock at your local library might still have copyright-protected elements.

In particular, the folks behind Fleischer Studios have signaled a willingness to fight over Betty Boop, who is headlining many of this year’s biggest “Public Domain Day” stories."

Blondie and Dagwood are entering the public domain, but Betty Boop still may be trapped in copyright jail; The Los Angeles Times, December 30, 2025

 Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times; Blondie and Dagwood are entering the public domain, but Betty Boop still may be trapped in copyright jail

"Duke’s Jenkins refers to “the harm of the long term — so many works could have been rediscovered earlier.” Moreover, she says, “so many works don’t make it out of obscurity.” The long consignment to the wilderness thwarts “preservation, access, education, creative reuse, scholarship, etc., when most of the works are out of circulation and not benefiting any rights holders.”

Among other drawbacks, she notes, “films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them.” Many films from the 1930s are theoretically available to the public domain now, but not really because they’ve been lost forever.

What would be the right length of time? “We could have that same experience after a much shorter term,” Jenkins told me. “Looking back at works from the ‘70s and ‘80s has similar excitement for me.” Economic models, she adds, have placed the optimal term at about 35 years.

It’s proper to note that just because something is scheduled to enter the public domain, that doesn’t mean legal wrangling over its copyright protection is settled. 

With recurring characters, for instance, only the version appearing in a given threshold year enters the public domain 95 years later; subsequent alternations or enhancements retain protection until their term is up. That has led to courthouse disputes over just what changes are significant enough to retain copyright for those changes. 

“Copyrightable aspects of a character’s evolution that appear in later, still-protected works may remain off-limits until those later works themselves expire,” Los Angeles copyright lawyer Aaron Moss said."