Welcome to the April A to Z Blogging Challenge! Every year, bloggers from around the world commit to posting every day in April (except Sundays), working through the alphabet one letter at a time. This year, I’m visiting twenty-six fictional alternate Earths — worlds that diverged from our own at some crucial moment and became something wonderfully, unsettlingly different. Think of it like the TV show Sliders, which followed a group of travelers “sliding” between parallel dimensions, never quite knowing what version of Earth they’d land on next. Each day, we visit a new one. Today: P.
The World That Owns Nothing and Everything
There is a version of Mickey Mouse on Public Domain Earth that wears a trench coat, smokes a cigarette, and has spent the last forty years working as a hard-boiled detective in a series of noir novels that have collectively sold about nine hundred million copies across seventeen publishing houses, none of which have paid a dime to anyone for the privilege of using him. In another corner of the culture, he is the protagonist of a sprawling Dostoevsky-inspired literary trilogy exploring the nature of identity and modern alienation. In yet another, he is a recurring background character in a series of erotic thrillers that would make Walt Disney’s ghost require immediate medical attention. All of these Mickeys coexist simultaneously, legally, without conflict, because on Public Domain Earth, there is no legal mechanism by which any of them could be challenged. Mickey Mouse belongs to everyone. So does Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Atticus Finch, Captain Ahab, and the collected works of roughly every author who ever lived. The genie, as they say, has been out of the bottle for over a century now.
It was never supposed to happen this way.
The Accident of Holt v. United States (1920)
The case that unmade intellectual property law was not, at its origin, about intellectual property at all. It was about wartime propaganda.
In 1917, the Wilson administration had commissioned a series of illustrated pamphlets as part of the war effort — patriotic materials, distributed widely, encouraging enlistment and the purchase of war bonds. The illustrations were contracted from private artists, and the question of who owned the resulting works — the government, the contractors, or the public — was left ambiguous in the original agreements, because in 1917, nobody particularly cared. The war ended. The artists cared.
The case wound its way through the federal courts for three years and arrived at the Supreme Court in 1920 as a relatively narrow question about government contractor ownership. The Court, in a 6-3 decision written by Justice Louis Brandeis, answered that narrow question clearly: works produced at government expense and for public purpose were public property, full stop. This was uncontroversial. What was not uncontroversial — what was, in fact, a legal grenade that nobody in the majority appeared to notice they were pulling the pin on — was the reasoning Brandeis used to get there.
Seeking a philosophical foundation for the ruling, Brandeis reached back to first principles. Copyright, he wrote, was a government-granted monopoly, and like all government-granted monopolies, it required affirmative justification in terms of public benefit. The benefit traditionally offered was incentive: authors create more if they can profit exclusively from what they’ve created. But Brandeis, in a passage that legal historians on Public Domain Earth still argue about with the intensity usually reserved for religion, went further. He questioned whether the incentive argument had ever been empirically established — and in doing so, introduced into the opinion’s reasoning the suggestion that the burden of proof lay with the monopoly, not with the public domain.
The three dissenting justices saw exactly where this was going. Their dissents were furious and, as it turned out, prophetic. Because within two years, the Brandeis reasoning had been picked up by a coalition of progressive reformers, newspaper publishers who resented paying wire service fees, and a genuinely motley assembly of artists who believed, with varying degrees of sincerity, that culture should be free. The coalition was not coherent. It did not need to be. It had a Supreme Court opinion to cite.
By 1922, Congress — under pressure, confused about what exactly Holt v. United States did and did not require, and frankly more preoccupied with Prohibition — passed the Public Information and Creative Freedom Act, which abolished copyright entirely and replaced it with nothing. The vote was closer than it should have been and further from coherent debate than it ever should have gotten. It passed because the opposition was disorganized, because the newspaper lobby was powerful, and because several key senators had been told, incorrectly, that the bill was narrowly targeted at government documents.
It was not narrowly targeted at government documents.
The Free-for-All
The decade following the Act is called, with varying degrees of affection and horror depending on who you ask, simply The Thirties. It was, by any reasonable measure, chaos.
The immediate effect was a publishing explosion unlike anything the world had seen. Printers who had been paying licensing fees suddenly paid none. Small publishers flooded the market with reprints, adaptations, sequels, prequels, mashups, and combinations of all of the above. The Great Gatsby — published just before the Act passed and caught in a frenzied legal debate about whether works created before 1922 were retroactively affected (they were) — was reissued in nineteen different editions within eighteen months, including one in which Jay Gatsby was reimagined as a jazz musician, one in which Daisy was the narrator, and one that was, inexplicably, set in ancient Rome.
The Roman Gatsby sold poorly. Other experiments did not.
What emerged from the chaos, slowly and with considerable stumbling, was something that genuine cultural optimists had predicted and genuine cultural pessimists had dismissed as naive: a remix culture of extraordinary vitality. Characters became communal property in the most literal sense. Sherlock Holmes crossed over with Dracula in a series of adventure novels that were simultaneously published by four different houses in slightly different versions, producing a strange literary ecosystem in which multiple canonical texts competed for readership. Arthur Conan Doyle, still alive and furious, wrote his own authorized continuation and watched it sell slightly less well than two of the unauthorized ones. He never recovered psychologically from this, which perhaps says something about the human relationship to authorship, or perhaps just something about Arthur Conan Doyle.
The film industry, facing the same free-for-all, adapted with characteristic speed and characteristic amorality. Studios that had built their business models on exclusive contracts pivoted immediately. If the story was free, the premium became the production — the specific cast, the specific visual style, the specific marketing apparatus that could make one version of a public domain property feel more legitimate, more essential, more worth watching than any of its competitors. This was, it turned out, something studios were already quite good at.
How the Mouse Was Monetized Without Owning Him
Here is the thing about Public Domain Earth that the idealists of 1922 did not fully account for: you do not need to own a character to dominate the market for that character. You need to be faster, bigger, and better at making people feel that your version is the real one.
The mechanism that emerged on Public Domain Earth — developed mostly through trial and error over the 1930s and 1940s, and then systematized with almost scientific precision by the postwar corporate entertainment complex — runs on three interlocking advantages that copyright law was never actually necessary to provide.
The first is trademark, which was never abolished. You cannot copyright Mickey Mouse on Public Domain Earth, but you can trademark the specific visual design your studio uses, the specific shade of red on his shorts, the specific curve of his ears as rendered by your animation department. Anyone can write a Mickey Mouse story. Nobody but the Walt Disney Company can put that particular Mickey on a lunchbox. The distinction sounds technical. In practice, it means that the Disney version of Mickey Mouse — the one that matches the trademark, the one that appears in the Disney theme parks, the one that has been marketed continuously for a century — is, in the public imagination, simply Mickey Mouse, regardless of the thousand other Mickeys proliferating in every direction. Trademark, it turns out, does most of the work that copyright used to do, for the entities large enough to defend it.
The second is speed. A large studio on Public Domain Earth can produce, distribute, and market an adaptation of any public domain property faster than any independent competitor. By the time a small publisher’s Sherlock Holmes adaptation reaches shelves, the major studio’s version has already been in theaters for six months and generated two sequels. Being first is not a legal right. It is simply an overwhelming advantage.
The third is platform. The corporations that control the distribution infrastructure — the theater chains, the streaming services, the publishing imprints with the best retail relationships, the audio platforms — exercise a gravitational pull that has nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with access. An independent creator can write any story they want on Public Domain Earth. Getting anyone to see it remains, as always, the actual problem.
The result is an intellectual landscape that is, depending on your disposition, either deeply inspiring or deeply ironic. The culture is genuinely richer for the free flow of characters and stories. The Sherlock Holmes expanded universe on Public Domain Earth is a vast, sprawling, contradictory, sometimes brilliant ecosystem of thousands of works by thousands of creators — precisely what copyright skeptics promised it would be. And sitting at the center of that ecosystem, producing the Holmes adaptations that most people actually watch, owning the trademark on the most recognizable version of the deerstalker and the pipe, controlling the streaming platform where sixty percent of all Holmes content is consumed, is a media conglomerate whose revenue would be, to our eyes, perfectly familiar.
Nobody owns Sherlock Holmes on Public Domain Earth. One company simply rents him to the most people.
What the Artists Think
Ask an independent creator on Public Domain Earth about the system and you will get one of two answers, delivered with equal passion.
The first answer is that it is extraordinary. That the freedom to build on any story, to bring any character into any genre, to write the Holmes story nobody ever wrote or the Gatsby continuation that the original deserved, is a creative liberation that cannot be overstated. The culture of Public Domain Earth is genuinely more porous, more collaborative, more willing to borrow and recombine and reinvent. Fan fiction on Public Domain Earth is simply called fiction. The line between professional and amateur creation is blurrier than on our world, and the blurriness has produced, at its edges, genuine art that could not have existed otherwise. There is an entire literary movement — the Remixists — that treats recombination as the central artistic act, that argues the original text is merely raw material and the adaptor is the real author. They are not wrong, exactly, and they are not entirely right.
The second answer is that it is a trap. That the promise of freedom was real and the delivery was incomplete. That the abolition of copyright helped large companies more than it helped individuals, because large companies were already positioned to exploit public domain properties at scale and individual creators were not. That the artist who creates something genuinely new — a new character, a new world, a new voice — has no protection against that creation being immediately absorbed, replicated, trademarked in its marketable form by whoever can move fastest, and effectively owned by someone who never imagined it. That the loudest advocates for the abolition of copyright in 1922 were, perhaps not coincidentally, the newspaper publishers and the early studio heads, and that the artists who were supposed to benefit from liberation have spent a century discovering that liberation and leverage are not the same thing.
Both answers are correct. This is, on Public Domain Earth, considered obvious. The debate has not been resolved. It has simply been institutionalized. There are annual conferences. There are think tanks. There are fourteen competing proposals currently before their version of Congress, all of which will be studied, discussed, amended, and set aside, because the system that exists — chaotic, fertile, unfair, extraordinarily productive, and entirely dominated by entities that were supposed to be made redundant by the abolition of copyright — is the system that everyone has learned to navigate, and navigating a known system is always preferable to the unknown shape of what might replace it.
Mickey Mouse, meanwhile, is starring in a new literary thriller in which he investigates the murder of a corporate trademark attorney. It has been published simultaneously by thirty-two houses. The Disney version is outselling all the others.
Nobody is surprised.
Join me Monday for Q — and another world waiting just beyond the edge of what we know.
The Confusing Middle 