The Public Domain Expands Again Soon . . . Are You Ready to Create?

Sara Benson
Nov 2 · 2 min read

The public domain was frozen, yes, completely stuck like a block of ice, for twenty years. Why you ask? Because Disney did not want to let Mickey Mouse enter into the public domain (more on Mickey later). And so, with the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act or CTEA in 1998, Disney helped to freeze the public domain for twenty years and they didn’t even require Elsa’s power to do it — no, just big lobbyists, that’s all it took.

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