These Iconic Characters Are About to Enter the Public Domain

Thanks to the merciless march of time, a number of your childhood (and maybe also adulthood) favorites are now almost old enough to enter the public domain. Visual Capitalist compiled a rundown of some of the most notable rising additions, from Popeye next year to Bambi in 2038.

Generally speaking, a work enters the public domain in the U.S. either 70 years after the death of its creator or 95 years after its publication. However, copyright law is knotty, and copyright holders are understandably loath to relinquish control of (and profits from) any popular character.

One complicating factor is that characters often evolve. When Mickey and Minnie Mouse entered the public domain earlier this year, they came with a huge catch: Only the iterations of those characters from the 1928 animated short Steamboat Willie were freely available. The more modern iterations are still heavily protected—and Disney is famously litigious against violators or potential violators, once going so far as to prevent Winnie the Pooh from being etched into a child’s gravestone.

An offshoot of that issue is adaptation. You can do whatever you want with the story of Sleeping Beauty, for example, which is centuries old; even the Grimm Brothers’ version published in 1896 is fair game, along with the name Sleeping Beauty. But if you start hawking T-shirts featuring Disney’s blonde Aurora in her pink (or blue) ball gown, you might end up the unhappy recipient of a cease-and-desist letter: Content from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, released in 1959, is not in the public domain. It’s a similar story with Snow White, Pinocchio, and Peter Pan; the stories and characters are free to use and profit from, but the Disney models of those stories and characters are not.

In short, peruse the list below with an eye to the earliest versions of each character and an awareness of what’s too new to fly. Just because Batman and Superman will be in the public domain by 2035 doesn’t mean you can revamp 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice that year to make it a better movie.

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