Copyright term
Based on Wikipedia: Copyright term
The Mouse That Ate the Public Domain
In 1998, something curious happened in the halls of the United States Congress. Mickey Mouse was about to turn seventy-five, and under the copyright laws of the time, that meant Disney's most famous creation would soon belong to everyone. Steamboat Willie, the 1928 cartoon that introduced Mickey to the world, was scheduled to enter the public domain.
It didn't happen.
Instead, Congress passed what critics derisively called the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act"—officially the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The law added twenty years to existing copyright terms, pushing Mickey's liberation back to 2024. This wasn't the first time copyright had been extended, and it wouldn't be the last. It was, however, a particularly vivid illustration of how the rules governing who owns creative works have been steadily rewritten over the past century.
What Copyright Actually Means
Before we can understand why these extensions matter, we need to understand what copyright is and what it isn't.
When you create something original—a novel, a song, a painting, a photograph, even a shopping list if it's creative enough—copyright law gives you a temporary monopoly over that work. You get to decide who can copy it, who can perform it, who can make derivative works based on it. The key word is temporary. Copyright was never meant to last forever.
The framers of the American Constitution understood this tradeoff explicitly. They gave Congress the power to grant copyrights and patents, but only "for limited Times." The reasoning was elegant: creators need an incentive to produce new works, but society also needs those works to eventually become freely available, where anyone can build upon them.
Think of it like a deal. Society says to the creator: "We'll give you exclusive rights for a while, enough time to profit from your work. In exchange, your work eventually becomes part of our shared cultural heritage."
The public domain is the name for this shared heritage—all the creative works that belong to everyone. Shakespeare's plays live there. So do Bach's fugues, Da Vinci's paintings, and ancient Greek philosophy. Anyone can perform Hamlet, adapt Pride and Prejudice into a zombie novel, or sample Beethoven's Fifth Symphony without asking permission or paying royalties.
The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain
Here's where things get troubling. That "limited time" has been growing longer and longer, to the point where it strains the meaning of the word "limited."
When the first American copyright law was passed in 1790, the term was fourteen years. If you registered your work and it was still valuable after fourteen years, you could renew for another fourteen. Twenty-eight years maximum. That was considered generous enough to reward creators while ensuring a steady flow of works into the public domain.
Today, in most of the world, copyright lasts for the life of the author plus fifty or seventy years. In the United States, for works created today, it's life plus seventy years. For older works created by corporations, it can be ninety-five years from publication.
To put this in perspective: if you write a novel at age twenty-five and live to be eighty-five, your copyright will last for one hundred thirty years. That means your great-great-grandchildren will still control your work. The novel won't enter the public domain until people who don't exist yet are old enough to retire.
The Ratchet Effect
How did we get here? Through a series of extensions that only ever move in one direction.
In 1831, the initial term was extended to twenty-eight years, with a fourteen-year renewal possible. In 1909, the renewal term was stretched to twenty-eight years, making the maximum fifty-six. In 1976, Congress switched to the life-plus-fifty model for new works. And in 1998, another twenty years were tacked on.
Each time, the argument was roughly the same: other countries have longer terms, and we need to harmonize. Or: creators deserve more protection. Or, though rarely stated so baldly: valuable copyrights are about to expire, and their owners have lobbied heavily for extension.
This ratchet only turns one way. No country has shortened its copyright term in modern times. Extensions happen; contractions don't. The public domain is always on the losing side of the negotiation.
The Ghost of Thomas Macaulay
The debate over copyright term isn't new. In 1841, a British politician named Thomas Babington Macaulay delivered a speech to the House of Commons that copyright scholars still quote today. He called copyright a monopoly—a word chosen deliberately for its negative connotations.
Macaulay wasn't against copyright. He thought it was useful and necessary. "It is desirable that we should have a supply of good books," he said. "We cannot have such a supply unless men of letters are liberally remunerated; and the least objectionable way of remunerating them is by means of copyright."
But he was against making that monopoly too long. A monopoly, he argued, imposes costs on society—higher prices, reduced access, slower diffusion of ideas. A short monopoly might be worth those costs. A long one probably isn't.
What's the right length? Macaulay didn't have a precise number. But modern economists have tried to calculate one.
Fifteen Years
In 2009, Rufus Pollock, an economist at the University of Cambridge, published a paper attempting to find the optimal copyright term. He built a mathematical model that weighed the benefits of incentivizing creation against the costs of restricting access. He plugged in real-world data about how creative works lose value over time and how creators respond to incentives.
His answer: fifteen years.
Not life plus seventy. Not life plus fifty. Fifteen years, full stop.
Now, economic models are simplified versions of reality, and there's room to disagree with Pollock's assumptions. But even if you doubled or tripled his estimate, you'd still end up with a number dramatically shorter than what we have today. The gap between the economically optimal term and the actual term is vast.
The Orphan Works Problem
Long copyright terms create practical problems beyond the philosophical ones. The most serious is what's called the orphan works problem.
Imagine you're a documentary filmmaker. You want to include a photograph from 1950 in your film. Under current law, that photograph is almost certainly still under copyright—it won't enter the public domain until 2046 at the earliest. But who owns it?
The photographer might have died decades ago. The company that employed them might have gone bankrupt, been acquired, or simply lost its records. The heirs might be scattered across three continents and unaware they own anything. You can search for months and find nothing.
This is an orphan work: still under copyright, but with no findable owner. You can't get permission because you can't find anyone to ask. And using it without permission means risking a lawsuit if an owner ever materializes.
The result is that vast quantities of twentieth-century culture are effectively locked away. Not because anyone is actively exploiting them—most orphan works have no commercial value—but because the legal risk of using them is too high. They're not in the public domain, but they're not really available either. They're in a kind of legal limbo.
Early copyright law avoided this problem by requiring registration and renewal. If you wanted copyright protection, you had to actively claim it, and you had to renew your claim periodically. Works that nobody bothered to register or renew entered the public domain automatically.
Modern copyright law works differently. Copyright attaches automatically the moment you create something. No registration needed. No renewal required. This is convenient for creators, but it means that every casual snapshot, every dashed-off email, every doodle on a napkin is technically copyrighted for over a century. The burden of figuring out what's protected and who owns it falls entirely on anyone who wants to use older works.
What We Lost
Consider what the 1998 copyright extension prevented from entering the public domain.
The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, didn't become freely available until 2021. For decades, anyone who wanted to adapt it, excerpt it extensively, or create derivative works needed permission from the Fitzgerald estate. That permission was sometimes denied, always expensive, and never guaranteed.
Peter Pan is an even stranger case. J. M. Barrie's play debuted in 1904, and his novelization appeared in 1911. Under normal rules, these works would have entered the public domain decades ago. But in 1929, Barrie donated his rights to Great Ormond Street Hospital, a children's hospital in London. When the copyright was about to expire in the United Kingdom, Parliament passed a special law granting the hospital perpetual royalties—forever, not limited, a bespoke exception to the general rule.
Mickey Mouse finally entered the public domain in 2024, nearly a century after his creation. Disney had lobbied for further extension but, for the first time, failed. Perhaps even Congress found it hard to argue that ninety-five years wasn't enough.
The Cumulative Burden
There's an argument that none of this matters much. If you want to write your own original novel or song, nobody's stopping you. Copyright only restricts copying, not creation.
But this misunderstands how culture works. Creativity doesn't happen in a vacuum. Every artist builds on what came before. Shakespeare drew on Holinshed's Chronicles. West Side Story reimagined Romeo and Juliet. Hip-hop was built on sampling. Fan fiction extends beloved characters into new stories.
When copyright terms are long, the available raw material shrinks. The works you grew up with, the songs that shaped your generation, the movies that defined your cultural moment—all of these remain locked away, usable only with permission and payment, long after their creators have died.
In 2013, economic historian Petra Moser studied the effects of Britain's 1814 copyright extension. She found that longer copyrights "raise the costs of accessing intellectual assets for consumers and other firms, which may discourage the diffusion of knowledge and decelerate the pace of cumulative innovation."
Translation: when works stay locked up longer, fewer people can build on them, and progress slows.
The Video Game Graveyard
Perhaps nowhere is the absurdity more visible than in classic video games.
Thousands of games from the 1980s and 1990s are effectively unplayable today. The companies that made them have gone bankrupt or merged. The code exists on decaying cartridges and floppy disks. No one is selling them. No one is maintaining them. But they're still under copyright, which means legally preserving them requires navigating a maze of permissions that often leads nowhere.
In 2014, a debate erupted in the gaming community when journalist John Walker suggested that games should enter the public domain after twenty years. Game industry veterans pushed back, arguing that creators deserved control over their works. But the practical reality is that most of these games are controlled by no one—their rights are orphaned, their code is rotting, and a century-long copyright serves only to ensure that preservation efforts remain legally risky.
The Monopoly Question
Is copyright really a monopoly? Some economists object to the term. A monopoly usually means control over an entire market—being the only seller of oil, or steel, or telephone service. Copyright gives you control only over your specific work. If you don't like the price of one novel, you can buy a different one.
But this misses something important. There's only one Great Gatsby. If you want to adapt that specific story, there are no substitutes. In this sense, every copyright is a tiny monopoly over a unique cultural artifact.
Whether you call it a monopoly or "monopolistic competition," the underlying dynamic is the same: the copyright holder can restrict access and charge whatever the market will bear. For works that have become part of our cultural fabric, this power can be significant.
Where We Are Now
The international standard, established by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, is life plus fifty years. Most wealthy countries have extended beyond this minimum to life plus seventy. The United States, European Union, and many others now use this longer term.
There's currently no serious political movement to shorten copyright terms. The lobbying pressure runs entirely in the other direction. Rights holders have concentrated interests and deep pockets. The public domain has no lobbyists.
But the arguments for shorter terms haven't gone away. If anything, they've grown stronger. Digital technology makes copying trivially easy and preservation urgently necessary. The orphan works problem grows worse with each passing year as more works fall into legal limbo. The gap between copyright's official justification—incentivizing creation—and its actual effect—enriching heirs and corporations long after creators have died—becomes ever more glaring.
A Thought Experiment
Imagine a different world. Imagine that copyright lasted, say, twenty-eight years, as it did in the United States for most of its history.
In this world, every song from before 1997 would be freely available to sample, remix, and reinterpret. Every movie from before 1997 could be restored, distributed, and built upon. The entire golden age of Hollywood would be in the public domain. So would the birth of rock and roll, the British Invasion, disco, punk, and early hip-hop.
Authors who published before 1997 would have had nearly three decades to profit from their works. That's long enough for most books to earn whatever they're going to earn. And after that, their works would belong to everyone—free to read, to teach, to adapt, to translate, to preserve.
Would creators still create in this world? The historical record suggests yes. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an explosion of creativity under copyright terms that now seem almost comically short. Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen all managed to produce lasting works without the promise of a century-long monopoly.
The question isn't whether creators need some protection. They do. The question is how much, and for how long. The answer we've settled on—more than a century for works created today—seems less like a carefully reasoned policy choice and more like the accumulated result of decades of lobbying.
The Cultural Commons
There's something worth preserving in the idea of a cultural commons—a shared storehouse of stories, songs, images, and ideas that belong to everyone. Every generation inherits this commons and adds to it. Shakespeare drew from it; his works now enrich it. The same is true for Beethoven, for Melville, for Picasso.
When copyright terms stretch to a century or more, this inheritance is delayed beyond any reasonable purpose. Works created by people now dead remain locked away, enriching their great-grandchildren rather than entering the commons. The deal that copyright was supposed to represent—a temporary monopoly in exchange for eventual public ownership—starts to look less like a deal and more like a taking.
The mouse escaped into the public domain in 2024. But the system that kept him locked up for ninety-five years remains in place, ready to protect the next valuable property for just as long. Until the law changes, the ratchet will keep turning, and the public domain will keep shrinking, one extension at a time.