Copyright for original Mickey Mouse persona to run out 1 January 2024

It is not too late to extend copyright on Mickey Mouse, even if Disney won't bother to try. Retroactively extending copyright terms to works whose copyright terms had already expired is constitutional according to the Supreme Court in the ruling Golan v. Holder (2012) [1].

The law at issue was the Uruguay Round Agreements Act [2] of 1994:

> 17 U.S.C. § 104A effectively copyrights many foreign works that were never before copyrighted in the U.S.[13] The works are subject to the normal U.S. copyright term, as if they had never entered the public domain.[14]

> The affected works are those which were in the public domain either due to a lack of international copyright agreements between the U.S. and the country of origin of the work, or due to a failure to meet U.S. copyright registration and notification formalities. Also affected are works which did have previous U.S. copyright, but which entered the public domain due to a failure to renew the copyright.

The Supreme Court affirmed 6-2 in Golan_v._Holder that the Uruguay Round Agreements Act did not violate the "limited time" condition of the Copyright Clause [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_v._Holder

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay_Round_Agreements_Act