MICHAEL HILTZIK, Los Angeles Times ; Column: Mickey Mouse and ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ enter the public domain on Jan. 1, a reminder of our crazy copyright laws
"Once a work enters the public domain, Jenkins says, “community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. ... Anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.”
In some cases, extended copyright seems to work against the public interest. Consider the stringent control exercised by the estate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — mostly his children — over his speeches and writings such as the “I Have a Dream” speech he delivered in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963...
The irony of the term extension is that Disney, which pushed so hard to keep its own creations out of the public domain, is perhaps our most assiduous exploiter of, yes, the public domain.
The core material of some of its most successful and profitable movies comes from Hans Christian Andersen, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and Charles Perrault — often freely reimagined and rewritten by Disney artists and writers.
Disney’s “Fantasia” mined musical history for compositions by Bach and Beethoven, but if the copyright terms Disney pushed for in 1998 were in place when the film was made in 1940, the compositions used in the film by Stravinsky, Ponchielli, Dukas, Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky would still be under copyright protection. If Disney had to pay licensing fees to those creators, the film probably could not have been made."
