A New Era for Mickey Mouse

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Mickey Mouse has long symbolized corporate efforts to control copyrighted material. As of January 1, an early version of the character is at last in the public domain.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Harvard’s Bundy standard
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A Big Step for Mousekind

An earlyversion of Mickey Mouse may soon be everywhere: on shirts, in movies, onstage making crude remarks and shaking his hips in little on his show). As of Monday, the iteration of Mickey Mouse from the 1928 movie —the mischievous rodent who uses a —is available in the public domain in America. Later depictions of the character are still under copyright. But the change is a major moment that Disney fought hard to postpone.