By: Jordon Moran
Writing can be like magic. Sitting down without a thought in your mind and ending with an entire story, crafted entirely of ink, paper, and imagination? There is something magical about that, and the more I learn about creative writing, or writing in general, the more like magic it becomes. Imagine, [JB1] if you will, a magical place filled with all your favorite characters from fiction. Who do you see? The Mummy that scared you as a child, or perhaps Hercules swooping you up in his arms to rescue you from its bandaged clutches? Maybe this whole scene is taking place on Blackbeard’s pirate ship as it hurdles through space being chased by the Mad God Azothoth. This is a real place! A place of magic and adventure, romance and betrayal, and it is an entire world of numerous settings and characters and stories in itself. This wonderous place is known in the literary world as the Public Domain.
The entire scene that I set up in the introduction is entirely possible to publish thanks to the public domain. Let us first understand what the public domain is. The public domain is intricately connected with our copyright laws. Basically, when an artist creates a character, they own that character under copyright law. They can profit from that character’s use in books, movies, and other forms of media. However, after a certain amount of time that creation would inevitably enter the public domain, thus shedding its copyright shackles and becoming free and legal for public use. This means that anyone can take a character or setting from the public domain and use it in their own original stories. In some cases, entire stories have been remixed in novel ways and rereleased successfully to the public, such as “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” and even the “Shakespeare’s Star Wars” series. The possibilities are endless, and the public domain is a great tool for writers of all ages and skill levels. However, no magical place is complete without conflict; without a villain, and the public domain is no exception, though the villain may surprise you for it is an unlikely entity!
The public domain was a wonderful and amazing system that worked perfectly until the late 90s. In 1998 Mickey Mouse was about to enter the public domain. How great would that be? To have free access to use one of America’s most loved characters in your own art is a dream for some[JB2] . And it will remain a dream for a very long time. You see, the greed of Disney and other companies seem to be more important than allowing the public to retain access to such a cash cow, so Disney and others lobbied in congress to change the copyright laws, therefore extending their ownership of their characters for decades longer. This led to an over 20 year void in the public domain, and another character had not entered it until 2019. The saddest part is that the characters that Disney kept under their thumbs were never their own characters in the first place, including Mickey Mouse! Almost all of their most popular characters, from Aladdin to Mulan and a plethora of others, were taken straight from the public domain, and every time they release a new live action redux of these works they are extending their ownership of each character, thereby keeping it from the public domain even longer. It is a truly dastardly deed they are committing, considering the characters they are making money off were never their own characters in the first place.
When I learned of the travesty set upon one of my passions by the family friendly, and apparently heinously greedy company that was a pillar of my childhood I was conflicted. Do I continue to support Disney after knowing what I know, or do I boycott them? After all they are not only stealing characters that aren’t theirs to steal from the public, but they are also wrongly profiting off them. Why should I give them my money? After some (not much) contemplation I decided to boycott Disney. I do not want my hard earned going toward a bogus company that steals from the poor to give to the rich, and while I would never condone breaking any laws of any kind, I often think about the times we live in and how easy it is to pirate movies online. I also think about the moral question, “Is it really stealing, if the object in question was originally stolen from you?” That is for the individual to decide.