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Credit: DisneyWhile most of the portrayals of Mickey Mouse since Steamboat Willie went into the public domain have been all fun and games, others have taken on a life of their own in a way that Disney fans simply are not going to like.
Reports from Wired shared that, on January 1, Mike Neville issued a creative challenge to Midjourney, which resulted in an unexpected and controversial outcome. The prompt he provided was to create an image of “Steamboat Willie” in a vintage Disney style, in black and white, with the character covered in white gel. We’ll let your imagination run with what the results look like.
Following the development of Steamboat Willie entering the public domain, a wave of homemade Steamboat Willie artwork flooded the internet and social media. Of course, it hasn’t just been fan-made memes and photos, either. Since the beginning of the year, two horror movies have been announced starring Mickey Mouse, as well as a horror video game. Steamboat Willie has been turned into an NFT, and there are more developments coming in the near future.
In the report with Wired, Neville shared that his creation was a project to “explore copyright thresholds.”
“My interest in generating the assets was to explore copyright thresholds and where the tools are currently,” he told Wired.
He was not alone in his AI-based experiments involving Steamboat Willie. As a matter of fact, the report shared numerous researchers who were developing projects with Mickey Mouse from the 1928 films Steamboat Willie, Plane Crazy, and Gallopin’ Gaucho, the report from Wired noted.
Consequently, the report also shared that some AI-generated Steamboat Willie images served as symbolic gestures of defiance toward Disney. For instance, on the social network Bluesky, a user using the pseudonym Virtual Balboa shared an image of Willie smoking a joint. In an email to the publication, they had this to say:
“I love the idea that Disney will be forced to spend money and resources looking at my stupid pictures to check if they are too far removed from Steamboat Willie to count as public domain,” they wrote.
Disney issued a statement on the free use of Steamboat Willie and his copyright last week, sharing that it would continue to “protect” its rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse.
“More modern versions of Mickey will remain unaffected by the expiration of the Steamboat Willie copyright, and Mickey will continue to play a leading role as a global ambassador for the Walt Disney Company in our storytelling, theme park attractions, and merchandise,” a Disney spokesperson told Deadline. “We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright, and we will work to safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters.”
For decades, copyright law in the United States allowed creators to hold exclusive rights to their works for a limited period of time, after which those works would enter the public domain, becoming freely accessible to the public. However, due to various changes in copyright law, the original copyright for Steamboat Willie was extended multiple times, effectively preventing it from entering the public domain for many years.
In 1998, the Copyright Term Extension Act, often referred to as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” extended the copyright term for works created between 1923 and 1977. This extension meant that Steamboat Willie and Mickey Mouse would remain under copyright protection for several more decades, much to the chagrin of many who believed that such extensions were detrimental to the public domain.
What do you think of the images and projects coming forward involving Mickey Mouse? Let Inside the Magic know in the comments!