Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, ABA ; Celebrating the Public Domain
"How does the public domain feed creativity? Here are just three examples. In 2025, you may have enjoyed Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, derived from Mary Shelley’s novel, or Wicked: For Good, derived from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. From the literary realm in 2024, Percival Everett’s novel James reimagined Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huckleberry’s friend who is an escaped slave. The novel won the 2024 National Book Award and Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. As summed up by a New York Times review: “‘Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.”
Mark Twain famously wanted copyright to last forever. If he had his wish, would his heirs have sued Everett? Thankfully, we did not have to find out, and Everett could publish James without such litigation. When author Alice Randall sought to revisit Gone with the Wind from the slaves’ perspective in The Wind Done Gone (2001), she was sued for copyright infringement. Gone with the Wind is copyrighted until 2032, and Randall only won the right to publish her work after a stressful and expensive lawsuit.
The newly public domain works from 1930 also illustrate how the public domain nurtures creativity. One of the best exemplars is Disney itself, whose beloved works, from Snow White and Cinderella to The Jungle Book and Sleeping Beauty, have consistently built upon the public domain. In 2026, copyright expired over nine early Mickey Mouse films. One of the things that made them so popular was their ingenious reuse of music. At the time, synchronizing moving images with sound was still new, and Walt Disney (correctly) predicted that sound films were the future. Steamboat Willie had pioneered a technique that would even become known as “mickey mousing”—synchronizing music with what was occurring on screen."
No comments:
Post a Comment