Yeah, but it also was designed around 128kB of RAM (itself an increase over the original plan to go with 64kB as I recall) so it's not like it could have run multiple apps if they wanted it to.

They were just trying to build one computer back then -- not a platform that would be in use in the future.

In fairness there was no consistency then as to what other buttons did, if anything, and it was confusing to people who already had to be taught what a mouse even was and how to use it. Also, Apple's mice ship for some years now have multiple 'buttons' (technically trackpad areas -- the mice have no physical buttons at all), and the platform has supported contextual menus since the late 90s.

Also, this isn't really a Steve thing. The NeXT machines all had two button mice.

Totally untrue. The original Mac had a power switch on the back left side. A big rocker switch near the compartment for changing the clock battery.

Power switches on the keyboard didn't appear until ADB came along for peripherals, which on the Mac was '87. Annoyingly not all of the machines could be powered on from the keyboard even as late as the mid-90s. And none of them would just shut down from the keyboard -- there was always a dialog box that could be canceled. The button was more related to the Apple II keyboard mounted reset switch.

Auto-inject was even sweeter. I never heard of auto eject failing in except in truly ancient drives (20-30 years old) that need to be lubricated and fixed up anyway. And if the machine crashed the disk would either eject on reboot, could be forced by holding the mouse button down during boot, or in the absolute worst case, ejected using a straightened paperclip in a subtle but conspicuous hole even with power off.

I don't think that was a Steve thing either -- hell, it took some effort just to get him to agree to the Sony 3.5" disk, which was a new thing and no standard at the time. Auto eject isn't a bad idea though, especially on removable media, so long as it can be overridden.

Authors are not inherently entitled to copyrights. They can carry any number of conditions, and in the past, have done. There's even still a few on the books.

There's no reason Congress cannot decide to say that if a work is allowed to go out of print for, say, a year, with some definition as to what constitutes being in print (so that authors don't just have to whip up a single copy) and what sorts of works the statute would apply to, then it enters the public domain. This would tend to encourage authors to keep works in print at all costs until it's no longer economical to do so, at which point they'd enter the public domain.

On a related note, you may wish to look at 17 USC 303(a), which encouraged authors to publish certain works before a deadline in order to lock in a certain duration of protection. The EU did something similar resulting in certain rare sound recordings getting very limited pressings in order to meet the minimum threshold.

Yes! We know this for a fact because: 1) Authorial copyright as we know now it did not exist anywhere until England in 1710, and did not become widespread until well into the 19th century. And 2) Even then, there were many limits, and it was not uncommon for a given author to not get copyright protection due to some failing on their part (such as publication without notice or registration, in the US).

Yet many works were published, many of which are among the finest works humanity has ever created.

Protecting authors is a means to an end, but it is not the goal of copyright. Basically, the goal of copyright is to promote the progress of science (i.e. knowledge). This is accomplished by A) encouraging authors to create and publish works that they otherwise would not have created and published. This is also accomplished by B) having the works be in the public domain so that they can be freely disseminated as widely as possible, used to the fullest possible extent, and serve as the basis for derivative creative works, which are treated with equal respect by copyright policy.

The mechanism we use to encourage authors for prong A is to give them a monopoly concerning a work. This is directly at odds with prong B. To address this, the monopoly is limited in time and scope -- not all uses of a work fall within copyright and it won't last forever. Nevertheless the system is largely controlled by the various publishing interests (movie studios, book publishers, record labels) with little concern for the public interest which should control. But if in actual practice the public interest was actually looked after, there would surely be other conditions that would limit copyrights so that authors got the minimum copyright necessary -- in duration and in the scope of rights protected -- that got them to create and publish their work, since, after all, giving them any more than that would be wasteful.

Depends on how inventive it is, I suppose.

The part of the copyright and patent clause that concerns copyrights and creative works is the promotion of science, which in the late 18th century when it was written, basically just meant 'knowledge.' The useful arts falls under patents and inventions, and means something like applied technology. There are still traces of this in English -- Patents deal with state of the art technology but the invention must be disclosed in a way understandable to a person having ordinary skill in the art, and must not be anticipated by previous examples, i.e. prior art.

Owning an original piece of art doesn't mean you have the copyright. The most the guy with the cels could do would be to publicly display them. This is the same sort of foolish behavior that the dopes that bought that Dune book the other year engaged in.

Two separate things, really.

From a copyright perspective, all that is in the public domain are the first three Mickey Mouse films. Attributes of the character in those films -- appearance, behavior, etc. -- may be used. Copying other attributes from still-copyrighted sources is not permitted, such as the particular voice, the color appearance of the character, etc. As those sources drop into the public domain too, over the years, they'll also become available.

But from a trademark perspective, the issue is whether customers may be confused as to the origin of goods bearing a Mickey Mouse logo (either as a character or even the word mark) -- are they from Disney or somewhere else? Also, whether junior users of the mark are diluting the uniqueness of the unquestionably famous Mickey Mouse mark even where there is no confusion by customers. This is typically framed as either blurring -- associating the mark with goods it's not normally applied to -- and tarnishment -- weakening the mark by associating it with unsavory, unflattering, or inferior goods.

So when you say:

They've already done this. (Also, even if they hadn't, Disney isn't losing rights to use Mickey Mouse themselves -- they're just losing rights to control others' use of it)

This brings us to the last couple important concepts: 1) Trademark is not a substitute for copyright; 2) When a copyright or patent enters the public domain, it can have the effect of causing a trademark on the thing that is now in the public domain to be lost through becoming generic.

Let's tackle the second one first: The point of a trademark is to give consumers assurances that goods marked with the mark share a common origin and are of the same level of quality (whether good or bad is irrelevant; the point is consistency). So if you see a bottle marked COCA-COLA, you know it must originate from the Coca-Cola Company and that it's going to taste like any other Coke. If Pepsi starts to sell soft drinks labeled as COCA-COLA but containing Pepsi, this is infringing because it confuses customers: they don't know where a given marked bottle comes from, or what's in it. The Coca-Cola Company can sue to stop this. But if they failed to protect their rights, they'd lose them because they would be allowing confusion to run rampant, and confusion is incompatible with a viable trademark.

In the late 19th century, Henry Perky invented shredded wheat and got a patent on the food itself, and on the method of making it. Since no one else could make it or sell it due to the patent, SHREDDED WHEAT functioned as a trademark; anything marked that way must come from Perky (or Nabisco, who ultimately acquired the rights), and would be consistent in quality. When the patent expired, rival company Kellog's started making it too, and also used the SHREDDED WHEAT mark. The US Supreme Court held that this was not infringing because with the expiration of the patent, everyone was free to make it, and call it by its name. Thus, the loss of the patent killed the trademark.

In a much later trademark case, the Court also held that trademark could not substitute for copyright; once a work is in the public domain, trademark cannot be used to prevent the public from using it.

Together this means that anyone can start making new Mickey Mouse films derivative of the public domain ones, starting next year, and using the Mickey Mouse character by name. This will kill the trademark, at least in the realm of creative works -- books, movies, comics, etc. Maybe sculptural works too, like plush toys (since the Mickey Mouse shape is the point, rather than a source identifier -- think of the difference between a shirt with a picture of a polo player and a shirt with the POLO mark on it). But not non-creative works, like Mickey Mouse-branded ice cream bars or wrist watches.

Certainly there's nothing that prevents the use of public domain characters as trademarks, like PETER PAN branded peanut butter, or KING ARTHUR branded flour. But equally, those trademarks don't prevent anyone from making new books or movies or what have you about the characters of Peter Pan or King Arthur.

All that being said, Disney has loads of money and is famously litigious, so it'll be interesting to see who goes first to test the waters.

Well, you can create derivatives based on the original version. Want him to have lines of dialog? That's fine, just don't copy the high pitched voice that was introduced in later, still protected cartoons. Instead have him sound like Barry White. Want him to have a different look? That's fine too, just don't copy from changes to the look introduced in later cartoons -- blue shorts instead of red (or the rarely seen green), for example.

It's been done before in the US.

Not only no, but hell no. It should be massively shortened.

I agree generally, except as to the last point: the character is Mickey Mouse. Nominative use permits the use of his name. In fact, given the almost total lack of dialogue or title cards for Steamboat Willie, and given the marketing of the thing ('Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie'), there's no reason to think that that is even the name of the character the Mickey Mouse character is portraying. Steamboat Willie is merely the name of the cartoon, and is evocative of Steamboat Bill, which is the pre-existing song that Mickey is whistling at the beginning.

In addition, remember that there are actually three Mickey Mouse short films hitting the public domain in 2024: Steamboat Willie, Plane Crazy, and The Galloping Gaucho. He can't be all of them, and Plane Crazy doesn't even make sense as a character name.

It depends on how you use it. If you use the Mickey Mouse character in a new creative work, that should be fine. If you use the Mickey Mouse character in connection with goods or services otherwise (e.g. on the wrapper of Mickey Mouse-branded chewing gum, for example), then you'll probably have legal trouble.

No it didn't, that's just stupid.

There are simply several different terms for different circumstances. You can find them easily at 17 USC 302-305.

For works created on or after January 1, 1978, the term is the life of the author plus 70 years. (Originally it was life + 50, and the extension simply added 20 years)

However, if the work is a joint work by multiple authors, the life in question is the life of the last surviving author.

And if the work is a work made for hire, or psuedonymous, or anonymous, then the term is a straightforward 95 years from the date of its first publication, or 120 years from the date of its creation, whichever is shorter. Life is not a factor whatsoever, unless the author reveals their identity by certain means before the time period runs out, in which case it switches over to the usual life + 70 rule as given above because now it's practical to determine that. Again, the terms had been 75 or 100 years, and the extension simply added 20 years.

There are additional rules for works created before but not published by January 1, 1978, and for works which were already copyrighted prior to January 1, 1978.

There's several, but the one relevant to this discussion is fair use, at 17 USC 107. While the for-profit nature of the use is a factor to be considered in the fair use analysis, that does not, by itself, indicate that the use is unfair.

I would suggest taking a look at Author's Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc., 804 F.3d 202 (2nd Cir. 2013) for a similar project in which a for-profit corporation copied and used copyrighted materials in their own project, in bulk, for profit, and was held not to have infringed on copyright in the process.

Given that AI training is not some sort of magic compression that breaks Shannon's Law, the use of works to train software is, if anything, even more fair than Google Book Search, which does copy entire works and store them permaently, even if they are not fully made available to the user.

This is pretty much what everyone expected. I was always surprised that Apple didn't give themselves a workaround by offering -- at least for the very high end -- the option to put new guts into the old case. Not really their usual MO, but it might have helped sell some more of the super expensive models, if that was important to them.

Copyrights in a character is really just a shorthand way of referring to the portions of one or more copyrighted works that describe the character, often as a gestalt.

But there is not really such a thing as a character copyright; only copyrights in works.

If you make your own Mickey cartoon you are at least infringing on the Steamboat Willie copyright from 1928 and maybe more depending on what version of Mickey you use.

Good news though: The 1928 version hits the public domain in three months. So long as you don't copy from later, still copyrighted works, you will be able to go nuts.

(For example, his voice came out in 1930, as I recall, so until the work that introduced the distinctive Mickey voice is also public domain, better err on the side of a Mickey that sounds like Barry White)

You said two ways and first -- what's the second?

Also, the person who holds the copyright of a preexisting work used as the basis for a derivative work does not get the copyright of an infringing derived work. That would be unconstitutional, and it's not in the law. Rather the copyright of a derivative work is only on the original portions, and to the extent that it is derivative an unauthorized work may simply not be copyrightable. This is all under 17 USC 103.