Here\u2019s a quick quiz about some cultural icons on the verge of experiencing a kind of rebirth:<\/p>\n
1. What was the original storyline of the Dagwood and Blondie comics?
2. What was Blondie\u2019s maiden name?
3. In her original incarnation, what animal was Betty Boop?<\/p>\n
Those characters all date from 1930, which means that on New Year\u2019s Day 2026 they lose their copyright protection \u2014 or at least some of it \u2014 and enter the public domain. That means that, creatively speaking, they\u2019re available for anyone to copy, share, slice and dice, reconfigure and recreate without payment to their former rights holders. But they\u2019ve been sequestered for so long that their origins have been obscured, allowing the public to rediscover them anew.<\/p>\n
\nOne can\u2019t escape the feeling that Disney saw his audience as children while Fleischer\u2019s target was more knowing adults, attuned to Betty Boop\u2019s seductiveness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u2014 Charles Silver, Museum of Modern Art<\/p>\n
Thanks to our convoluted copyright laws in the U.S., the wait has been 95 years. <\/p>\n
These characters aren\u2019t the only artistic creations entering the public domain this year. As Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke Law School report in their indispensable annual report<\/a> about public domain day, the list includes Dashiell Hammett\u2019s fully realized book version of \u201cThe Maltese Falcon\u201d (perhaps better known through the 1941 Humphrey Bogart movie); Nancy Drew; Dick and Jane, those icons of reading instruction through the 1970s; the Gershwin brothers\u2019 song \u201cI Got Rhythm\u201d; the Marx Brothers\u2019 second full-length film, \u201cAnimal Crackers\u201d; and The Little Engine that Could.<\/p>\n
Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik <\/p>\n
Before we explore the consequences of the long wait for copyright expiration, here are the answers to the above quiz: <\/p>\n
1. Dagwood Bumstead was the scion of a rich family that disowned him when he married Blondie, a flapper \u2014 forcing him to take an office job under the irascible J.C. Dithers.
2. Blondie\u2019s maiden name was Boopadoop.
3. Betty Boop was a dog.<\/p>\nThose characters have been part of America\u2019s cultural heritage almost since their first appearance \u2014 the Blondie comic strip still runs daily in The Times, and Betty Boop\u2019s image is widely and popularly merchandised. <\/p>\n
Why the long wait? Blame commercial interests, including the Walt Disney Co., which agitated for the long term chiefly to maintain control of Mickey Mouse for as long as possible. (Mickey entered the public domain in 2024<\/a>, which was 95 years after his first appearance in the 1928 short \u201cSteamboat Willie.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Congress has gifted those commercial actors with repeated copyright extensions. The initial copyright act, passed in 1790, provided for a term of 28 years including a 14-year renewal. In 1909 that was extended to 56 years including a 28-year renewal.<\/p>\n
In 1976 the term for material owned by their creators or heirs was changed to the creator\u2019s life plus 50 years. In 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, which is known as the Sonny Bono Act after its chief promoter on Capitol Hill. That law extended the basic term to life plus 70 years; works for hire (in which a third party owns the rights to a creative work), pseudonymous and anonymous works were protected for 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter. <\/p>\n
Along the way Congress extended copyright protection from written works to movies, recordings, performances and ultimately to almost all works, both published and unpublished.<\/p>\n
The extensions were rationalized by the theory that creators (or their heirs) should be entitled to income from a work well into the distant future in order to incentivize artists to create. <\/p>\n
But that\u2019s a category error. In truth the income stream from all but a tiny minority of published works largely disappears after a few years, and what does arrive decades in the future has a minuscule present value at the time of creation. The 20-year extension in the 1998 law, as 17 economists (including five Nobel laureates) wrote in a 2002 Supreme Court brief<\/a>, provided \u201cno significant incentive to create new works\u201d and arguably less for existing works. The beneficiaries of the extended term generally are businesses that desire not to create something new, but to keep exploiting old content that still produces a strong revenue stream (i.e., Mickey Mouse).<\/p>\n
There\u2019s something to be said for the virtue of relegating important works to a period of obscurity to turbo-charge the excitement of rediscovery. But not much, and especially only after a wait of 95 years. <\/p>\n
Duke\u2019s Jenkins refers to \u201cthe harm of the long term \u2014 so many works could have been rediscovered earlier.\u201d Moreover, she says, \u201cso many works don\u2019t make it out of obscurity.\u201d The long consignment to the wilderness thwarts \u201cpreservation, access, education, creative reuse, scholarship, etc., when most of the works are out of circulation and not benefiting any rights holders.\u201d <\/p>\n
Among other drawbacks, she notes, \u201cfilms have disintegrated<\/a> because preservationists can\u2019t digitize them.\u201d Many films from the 1930s are theoretically available to the public domain now, but not really because they\u2019ve been lost forever<\/a>.<\/p>\n
What would be the right length of time? \u201cWe could have that same experience after a much shorter term,\u201d Jenkins told me. \u201cLooking back at works from the \u201870s and \u201880s has similar excitement for me.\u201d Economic models, she adds, have placed the optimal term at about 35 years.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s proper to note that just because something is scheduled to enter the public domain, that doesn\u2019t mean legal wrangling over its copyright protection is settled. <\/p>\n
With recurring characters, for instance, only the version appearing in a given threshold year enters the public domain 95 years later; subsequent alternations or enhancements retain protection until their term is up. That has led to courthouse disputes over just what changes are significant enough to retain copyright for those changes. <\/p>\n
\u201cCopyrightable aspects of a character\u2019s evolution that appear in later, still-protected works may remain off-limits until those later works themselves expire,\u201d Los Angeles copyright lawyer Aaron Moss<\/a> said. That aspect of copyright law engendered a lengthy dispute waged by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle against creative artists wishing to put Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson into new works. <\/p>\n
Holmes and Watson first appeared in the novel \u201cA Study in Scarlet,\u201d published in 1887, but the estate attempted to block an anthology of Holmes stories by outside authors planned for 2013. Its argument was that it retained the rights to the characters as long as any of Conan Doyle\u2019s novels or stories remained under copyright, which wouldn\u2019t expire until 2023. A federal judge threw out that argument in 2014; in 2023 the estate\u2019s claim breathed its last breath, and Holmes and Watson indisputably belonged to the public.<\/p>\n
That brings us to the case of Betty Boop, which may occupy the copyright bar for years to come.<\/p>\n
The argument for Betty\u2019s entry into the public domain stems from her initial appearance in a short titled \u201cDizzy Dishes,\u201d by the brilliant animator Max Fleischer and his brother Dave. <\/p>\n
The Fleischers and Disney were contemporaries, but the resemblance ends there. Their animation techniques were utterly different, as was their character. <\/p>\n
\u201cBroadly speaking, there was an innocence in Disney\u2019s view of the world, while Fleischer projected an underlying kinkiness<\/a>,\u201d Charles Silver, the film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote in 2011. \u201cAlthough the films were shown to all audiences, one can\u2019t escape the feeling that Disney saw his audience as children while Fleischer\u2019s target was more knowing adults, attuned to Betty Boop\u2019s seductiveness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fleischer Studios went out of business in 1946. By then it had sold the rights to its cartoons and the Betty Boop character. A new Fleischer Studios was formed in the 1970s by Fleischer descendants, including Max\u2019s grandson Mark Fleischer, and set about repurchasing the rights that had been sold. <\/p>\n
Whether it reacquired the rights to Betty Boop is up for discussion. (The controversy doesn\u2019t involve Fleischer\u2019s trademark rights in Betty Boop, which are separate from copyrights and bars anyone from using the character in a way that suggests they represent Fleischer.) <\/p>\n
According to a federal appeals court ruling in 2011<\/a>, the answer is no. Having navigated its way through the three or four copyright transfers that followed the original rights sale, the appeals court concluded that the original Fleischer studios sold the rights to Betty Boop and the related cartoons to Paramount in 1941 but couldn\u2019t verify that the rights to the character had been sold in an unbroken chain placing them with the new studio. <\/p>\n
The \u201cchain of title\u201d was broken, the appellate judges found \u2014 but they didn\u2019t say who ended up with Betty Boop. The Fleischers maintain that they own the Betty Boop rights through \u201cseveral different chains of title, which we believe are all valid,\u201d Mark Fleischer says. <\/p>\n
What about the Betty Boop of \u201cDizzy Dishes,\u201d which is indisputably entering the public domain in 2026? Mark Fleischer told me the Betty Boop-like character in that short may be in the public domain but \u201cis not the Betty Boop we know today.\u201d <\/p>\n
In a \u201cfact check\u201d posted on its website, Fleischer Studios states bluntly that the idea that Betty Boop is entering the public domain is \u201cactually not true.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n
Yet the character in \u201cDizzy Dishes\u201d certainly looks and sounds a lot like the Betty Boop we know today. She\u2019s a flapper with a short skirt and spit-curled coif, the facial structure of Betty Boop, speaks with the high-pitched voice of Betty Boop and utters the catchphrase \u201cboop-boop-ba-doop\u201d (which was identified with a popular singer of the period). But she also has a few canine characteristics that soon disappeared \u2014 chiefly flapping dog ears, which morphed into hoop earrings by 1932. <\/p>\n