Mickey Mouse Puts the "AI" in Public DomAIn
Creative Works That Fall Out of Copyright Are AI’s Dream, Not Hallucination
Happy New Year Mickey Mouse! With a simple turn of the calendar, you and Minnie just entered a whole new world – the public domain. That means that anyone can – and many will – create entirely new works starring you (at least the original incarnation of you from “Steamboat Willie”), without the need for obtaining any license, payment or cheese of any kind. That’s why you, the original friendly mouse, will now star in a just-announced slasher film “Mickey’s Mouse Trap” coming later this year. And you’re not alone. You’re following your animated pal Winnie the Pooh into the public domain’s wild west, because Pooh too just went dark. His horror film, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,” was released last year.
None of this is new of course. It’s a tale as old as time. Copyright only conveys exclusive ownership and commercialization for a limited period of time, after which that creative work is available to us all. Entire creative kingdoms have been built this way, magic kingdoms in fact. It was the great Walt Disney himself who first perfected the art of creative copyright when he took the classic, yet very public domain, early 19th century Grimm fairy tale “Snow White” and made it his own, wrapping it in a new fresh blanket of copyright protection. Fast forward almost 90 years and Disney is now today’s leading traditional media company now valued at nearly $170 billion.
But AI used with public domain creative work generates an entirely new and potentially highly lucrative kind of creative “unlock” for enterprising young creators (and their financiers). AI is the new creative alchemist – the new Walt DisnAI so to speak – and public domain creative works represent a new treasure trove of material on which to train.
Generative AI’s fundamental promise in the world of media and entertainment is to take a single prompt – as augmented by any number of additional prompts – and tirelessly “create” endless iterations. So just imagine an AI-supercharged Mickey Mouse. The sheer number of possible “re-imagined” works is mind-boggling and dwarfs Uncle Walt’s quaint little “Snow White” public domain opportunity. It’s also the ease (and minimal resources) necessary to create them, especially as generative AI improves.
Right now, AI can produce songs and write entire movie scripts literally in seconds based on basic prompts. We already see short films being produced the same way. Full feature films are next at a tiny fraction of the time and cost historically necessary to create them. Just imagine the time, love and care it took for Walt Disney to draw each frame for the animated “Steamboat Willie” in 1928. AI ain’t that.
AI, of course, also boasts other transformational “chops.” It can fine-tune creative works of the past in order to make them presentable for the first time. Case in point the recent brilliant “The Beatles: Get Back” documentary on Apple TV where AI repurposed priceless, but deeply damaged, videos of the Fab Four in the recording studio, much of which had never before seen the light of day. The Beatles just shocked the world again this past November when they used AI to finish the song “Now And Then”, their first new track in decades. AI made this possible by “fixing” the sounds on a long-forgotten demo track that John Lennon recorded shortly before he was killed. AI even recently completed Beethoven’s previously unfinished “Tenth Symphony,” and now can breathlessly write new ones based directly on the master’s works thanks to the public domain.
Let’s also not forget that today’s AI-infused public domain is fundamentally different from the ghosts of public domain’s past in terms of commercial possibilities. Disney’s massive investment in building the Mickey Mouse character over time, together with the massive global goodwill and commercial value that resulted from it, significantly increases the odds for new public domain-driven creative works to find a global audience willing to pay at a scale never-before-possible. In other words, the new Mickey “The Slasher” Mouse directly benefits from Disney’s massive investment. Its producers will deny any explicit endorsement of course. But come on, we, the audience, fully know that Walt is there, lurking in the halls of the upcoming horror film.
All of this builds to the exciting final act of this fAIry tAIl. Big Tech’s generative AI currently faces an existential creative crisis that is now being litigated in the courts – the fundamental question of whether AI’s training on copyrighted works at scale constitutes mass infringement. The creative community’s latest shot across Big Tech’s AI bow in that regard is The New York Times newly-filed lawsuit against Microsoft and its rambunctious cousin OpenAI, in which the Times seeks massive damages for both AI’s scraping of its copyrighted works and generation of competing works.
OpenAI, of course, will claim “fair use” – and the case likely will settle – but the creative community understandably will not go gentle in into that good night (to quote Dylan Thomas, whose works also just crossed the public domain rubicon as of January 1st). It is likely that creators ultimately will benefit from some kind of system that tracks and pays them, much like Google’s current Content ID system tracks and pays for copyrighted works that find their way on to YouTube. That means that Big Tech’s AI “creative” engine will look for new more “cost-effective” sources of inspiration to fuel its voracious appetite – and voila, “Here’s Mickey!”
Yes, Walt’s original “Steamboat Willie” mouse will welcome Big Tech and those who use its AI tools to the brave new public domain world. Now each of us can even create our very own Mickey Mouse chatbot in minutes without needing to worry about Disney’s legal machine raining down on us. Just last week, OpenAI opened its doors to its new App Store where anyone can create their own customized ChatGPT bot.
And so it goes. Those who live by the sword, also die by it. Disney – the original great alchemist of public domain creative works – now finds itself on the losing end of the stick. All Disney’s teams of lawyers can do now is watch the slasher “Evil Mickey” closely and make sure that he sticks closely to the original “Steamboat Willie” script.