YouTube Still Blocking Access To Steamboat Willie On Behalf Of Disney In Some Countries
As you well know, the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain in the US, meaning you can use a version of that Mickey (or any other newly public domain work) in our Gaming Like It's 1928 Public Domain Game Jam. Also, we're already seeing some of the expected effort to put down low quality stakes, including the inevitable Mickey Mouse horror film and Mickey Mouse horror video game.
While unsurprising and easy, in the meantime we're also seeing lots of folks uploading the original Steamboat Willie in a variety of places. You can find lots of versions uploaded to YouTube. But just because Mickey is public domain in the US, that does not mean that Big Mouse will simply stop the copyright claiming.
Matt Lee uploaded his own copy only to quickly get notified that the video was being blocked in certain countries (as a side note, Bluesky content is now public, so you can see the posts on Bluesky without an account).
I figured I'd check it out via the magic of VPN travel. I could still view his upload from Germany, but when I bounced over to Poland, I got the following:
I've seen some commentary suggesting that Steamboat Willie is not yet in the public domain in the EU, which might explain this, but it's not clear to me if this is true. The EU is supposed to apply the rule of the shorter term,' respecting the entrance into the public domain in other countries if the work originated in those countries, though as that article notes, a German court decided that an 1892 treaty between the US and Germany pre-empted that obligation.
But, still, assuming Poland does respect the rule of the shorter term, it seems like Steamboat Willie should be free there as well.
It's also not clear what triggered this. It might just be YouTube's ContentID autoflagging stuff, and no one bothered to update the system to recognize that Steamboat Willie is in the public domain. Or, maybe Disney hasn't updated things on its end (or perhaps it only did so in the US).
Either way, in a global era, all of this seems pretty silly anyway. I mean, given that the intent of copyright law was to give a creator the incentive to create in the first place, and the initial 56 years the US gave Disney seemed like enough at the time, it's absolutely ridiculous that we're still even in this spot. Mickey should have been freed decades ago.
But, for now, it seems to be taking some time to work that public domain-ness through the system.