Copyright, patent, trademark, and similar laws aim to keep properties from being stolen by people who don’t own them. If someone spends years making a carefully crafted story and someone else makes a different version that’s more successful, it could ruin many people’s careers. However, as important as copyright laws are, they can sometimes be restrictive. According to Stanford Libraries, to keep memories spreading while keeping the original artists and authors credited, works enter the public domain roughly 70 years after the artist’s or author’s death, although there are differences between music, books, movies, and other works. While this does mean that the original ideas can be changed, many limitations can occur.
For someone to create an original recreation, they would have to be careful to use only things that are in the original works or are completely original. If a design detail is added by a company that took ownership of the work at a later date, that can still be protected. According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, things like names, titles, and logos can be protected under trademark laws, meaning you may need clever word choices or the use of hyphens and slashes to avoid infringement. Despite these and many more restrictions, the original works enter the public domain.
Naturally, as many popular works have entered the public domain, people wanted to take advantage of it. Because of this, Movies such as “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey”, “The Mean One”, and most recently “Steamboat Willie” have come out parodying the original works. Despite being legal by the public domain, many of these are low quality, likely either from small teams wanting to do something fun or larger teams trying to profit off of the name. Regardless of movies like these, there are also higher quality works that slowly but surely will continue arising, especially as more and more works enter the public domain.
Despite the term becoming more well-known recently, the idea of old works entering the public domain has existed for some time. While many movies are only starting to enter the public domain, many old books, songs, and art pieces have been in the public domain for decades. Many popular stories, songs, and plays you may know well were not necessarily made before copyright was as it is today, but may have just entered the public domain long ago. This also means that in the future, new forms of work likely will begin to enter the public domain, and many of your favorite stories, games, or books could be remade.
As more and more works enter the public domain, the future remains uncertain. But despite the unclear future, it is guaranteed that the public domain will stay an important part of all works.
