#duke of the wicked

[roxspoxs]

This will find my people.

My 3 favorite guys in the whole world ❤️

[carli-meows]

i dont remember what the punchline was, but it made me happy to draw this

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/dastar-dly-deeds/#roast-in-piss-sonny-bono

In 1976, Congress set fire to the country's libraries; in 1998, they did it again. Today, in 2024, the flames have died down, and out of the ashes a new public domain is growing. Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate!

For most of US history, copyright was something you had to ask for. To copyright a work, you'd send a copy to the Library of Congress and they'd issue you a copyright. Not only did that let you display a copyright mark on your work – so people would know they weren't allowed to copy it without your permission – but if anyone wanted to figure out who to ask in order to get permission to copy or adapt a work, they could just go look up the paperwork at the LoC.

In 1976, Congress amended the Copyright Act to eliminate the "formality" of copyright registration. Now, all creative works of human authorship were copyrighted "at the moment of fixation" – the instant you drew, typed, wrote, filmed, or recorded them. From a toddler's nursery-school finger-painting to a graffiti mural on a subway car, every creative act suddenly became an article of property.

But whose property? That was on you to figure out, before you could copy, publish, perform, or preserve the work, because without registration, permissions had to start with a scavenger hunt for the person who could grant it. Congress simultaneously enacted a massive expansion of property rights, while abolishing the title registry that spelled out who owned what. As though this wasn't enough, Congress reached back in time and plopped an extra 20 years' onto the copyrights of existing works, even ones whose authors were unknown and unlocatable.

For the next 20 years, creative workers, archivists, educators and fans struggled in the face of this regime of unknowable property rights. After decades of well-documented problems, Congress acted again: they made it worse.

In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, AKA the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act, AKA the Copyright Term Extension Act. The 1998 Act tacked another 20 years onto copyright terms, but not just for works that were still in copyright. At the insistence of Disney, Congress actually yanked works out of the public domain – works that had been anthologized, adapted and re-issued – and put them back into copyright for two more decades. Copyright stretched to the century-plus "life plus 70 years" term. Nothing entered the public domain for the next 20 years.

So many of my comrades in the fight for the public domain were certain that this would happen again in 2018. In 2010, e-book inventor and Project Gutenberg founder Michael S Hart and I got into a friendly email argument because he was positive that in 2018, Congress would set fire to the public domain again. When I insisted that there was no way this could happen given the public bitterness over the 1998 Act, he told me I was being naive, but said he hoped that I was right.

Michael didn't live to see it, but in 2019, the public domain opened again. It was an incredible day:

https://archive.org/details/ClosingKeynoteForGrandReopeningOfThePublicDomainCoryDoctorowAtInternetArchive

No one has done a better job of chronicling the fortunes of our fragile, beautiful, bounteous public domain than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Every year from 2010-2019, Boyle and Jenkins chronicled the works that weren't entering the public domain because of the 1998 Act, making sure we knew what had been stolen from our cultural commons. In so many cases, these works disappeared before their copyrights expired, for example, the majority of silent films are lost forever.

Then, in 2019, Jenkins and Boyle got to start cataloging the works that were entering the public domain, most of them from 1923 (copyright is complicated, so not everything that entered the public domain in 2019 was from that year):

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2019/

Every year since, they've celebrated a new bumper crop. Last year, we got Mickey Mouse!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey

In addition to numerous other works – by Woolf, Hemingway, Doyle, Christie, Proust, Hesse, Milne, DuBois, Frost, Chaplin, Escher, and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes

Now, 2024 was a fantastic year for the public domain, but – as you'll see in the 2025 edition of the Public Domain Day post – 2025 is even better:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/

So what's entering the public domain this year? Well, for one thing, there's more of the stuff from last year, which makes sense: if Hemingway's first books entered the PD last year, then this year, we'll the books he wrote next (and this will continue every year until we catch up with Hemingway's tragic death).

There are some big hits from our returning champions, like Woolf's To the Lighthouse and A Farewell to Arms from Hemingway. Jenkins and Boyle call particular attention to one book: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, its title taken from a public domain work by Shakespeare. As they write, Faulkner spoke eloquently about the nature of posterity and culture:

[Humanity] is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance…The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

The main attraction on last year's Public Domain Day was the entry of Steamboat Willie – the first Mickey Mouse cartoon – into the public domain. This year, we're getting a dozen new Mickey cartoons, including the first Mickey talkie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse_(film_series)#1929

Those 12 shorts represent a kind of creative explosion for the Disney Studios. Those early Mickey cartoons were, each and every one, a hybrid of new copyrighted works and the public domain. The backbone of each Mickey short was a beloved, public domain song, with Mickey's motion synched to the beat (animators came to call this "mickey mousing"). In 1929, there was a huge crop of public domain music that anyone could use this way:

Blue Danube, Pop Goes the Weasel, Yankee Doodle, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, Ach Du Lieber Augustin, Listen to the Mocking Bird, A-Hunting We Will Go, Dixie, The Girl I Left Behind Me, a tune known as the snake charmer song, Coming Thru the Rye, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Auld Lang Syne, Aloha ‘Oe, Turkey in the Straw, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, Habanera and Toreador Song from Carmen, Lizst’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Goodnight, Ladies.

These were recent compositions, songs that were written and popularized in the lifetimes of the parents and grandparents who took their kids to the movies to see Mickey shorts like "The Barn Dance," "The Opry House" and "The Jazz Fool." The ability to plunder this music at will was key to the success of Mickey Mouse and Disney. Think of all the Mickeys and Disneys we've lost by locking up the public domain for the past half-century!

This year, we're getting some outstanding new old music for our public domain. The complexities of copyright terms mean that compositions from 1929 are entering the public domain, but we're only getting recordings from 1924. 1924's outstanding recordings include:

George Gershwin performing Rhapsody in Blue, Jelly Roll Morton playing Shreveport Stomp, and an early recording from contralto and civil rights icon Marian Anderson, who is famous for her 1939 performance to an integrated audience of over 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson’s 1924 recording is of the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

While the compositions include Singin' in the Rain, Ain't Misbehavin', An American in Paris, Bolero, (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue, Tiptoe Through the Tulips, Happy Days Are Here Again, What Is This Thing Called, Love?, Am I Blue? and many, many more.

On the art front, we're getting Salvador Dali's earliest surrealist masterpieces, like Illumined Pleasures, The Accommodations of Desire, and The Great Masturbator. Dali's contemporaries are not so lucky: after a century, the early history of the works of Magritte are so muddy that it's impossible to say whether they are in or out of copyright.

But there's plenty of art with clearer provenance that we can welcome into the public domain this year, most notably, Popeye and Tintin. As the first Popeye and Tintin comics go PD, so too do those characters.

The idea that a fictional character can have a copyright separate from the stories they appear in is relatively new, and it's weird and very stupid. Courts have found that the Batmobile is a copyrightable character (Batman won't enter the public domain until 2035).

Copyright for characters is such a muddy, gross, weird idea. The clearest example of how stupid this gets comes from Sherlock Holmes, whose canon spans many years. The Doyle estate – a rent-seeking copyright troll – claimed that Holmes wouldn't enter the public domain until every Holmes story was in the public domain (that's this year, incidentally!).

This didn't fly, so their next gambit was to claim copyright over those aspects of Holmes's character that were developed later in the stories. For example, they claimed that Holmes didn't show compassion until the later stories, and, on that basis, sued the creators of the Enola Holmes TV show for depicting a gender-swapped Sherlock who wasn't a total dick:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/22/lawsuit-copyright-warmer-sherlock-holmes-dismissed-enola-holmes

As the Enola lawyers pointed out in their briefs, this was tantamount to a copyright over emotions: "Copyright law does not allow the ownership of generic concepts like warmth, kindness, empathy, or respect, even as expressed by a public domain character – which, of course, belongs to the public, not plaintiff."

When Mickey entered the public domain last year, Jenkins did an excellent deep dive into which aspects of Mickey's character and design emerged when:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/

Jenkins uses this year's entry of Tintin and Popeye into the public domain to further explore the subject of proprietary characters.

Even though copyright extends to characters, it only covers the "copyrightable" parts of those characters. As the Enola lawyers wrote, the generic character traits (their age, emotional vibe, etc) are not protected. Neither is anything "trivial" or "minuscule" – for example, if a cartoonist makes a minor alteration to the way a character's pupils or eyes are drawn, that's a minor detail, not a copyrightable element.

The biggest impediment to using public domain characters isn't copyright, it's trademark. Trademark is very different from copyright: foundationally, trademark is the right to protect your customers from being deceived by your competitors. Coke can use trademark to stop Pepsi from selling its sugary drinks in Coke cans – not because it owns the word "Coke" or the Coke logo, but because it has been deputized to protect Coke drinkers from being tricked into buying not-Coke, thinking that they're getting the true Black Waters of American Imperialism.

Companies claim trademarks over cartoon characters all the time, and license those trademarks on food, clothing, toys, and more (remember Popeye candy cigarettes?).

Indeed, Hearst Holdings claims a trademark over Popeye in many traditional categories, like cartoons, amusement parks, ads and clothes. They're also in the midst of applying for a Popeye NFT trademark (lol).

Does that mean you can't use Popeye in any of those ways? Nope! All you need to do is prominently mention that your use of Popeye is unofficial, not associated with Hearst, and dispel any chance of confusion. A unanimous Supreme Court decision (in Dastar) affirm your right to do so. You can also use Popeye in the title of your unauthorized Popeye comic, thanks to a case called Rogers v Grimaldi.

This all applies to Tintin, too – a big deal, given that Tintin is managed by a notorious copyright bully who delights in cruelly terrorizing fan artists. Tintin is joined in the public domain by Buck Rogers, another old-timey character whose owners are scumbag rent-seekers.

Congress buried the public domain alive in 1976, and dumped a load of gravel over its grave in 1998, but miraculously, we've managed to exhume the PD, and it has been revived and is showing signs of rude health.

2024 saw the blockbuster film adaptation of Wicked, based on the public domain Oz books. It also saw the publication of James, a celebrated retelling of Twain's Huck Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved sidekick.

This is completely normal. It's how art was made since time immemorial. The 40 year experiment in life without a public domain is at an end, and not a minute too soon.

You can piece together a complete-as-possible list of 2025's public domain (including the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts, Disney's Skeleton Dance, and Del Ruth's Gold Diggers of Broadway) here:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/

[insaneclownpossearchive]

[dearabsolutelynoone]

“The family is noted as full of perfectly handsome sons…

…and perfectly beautiful daughters.”

[sea-owl]

I GOT MY ILLUMICRATE BRIDGERTON BOOKS AND THEY'RE GORGEOUS!

[etherrealsx]

The Bridgerton couples as Taylor Swift songs

Daphne & Simon: Haunted

"Come on, come on, don't leave me like this. I thought I had you figured out. Something's gone terribly wrong, you're all I wanted. Come on, come on, don't leave me like this. I thought I had you figured out. Can't breathe whenever you're gone, can't go back now I'm haunted."

Anthony & Kate: The Great War

"We will never go back to that bloodshed, crimson clover, the worst was over, my hand was the one you reached for all throughout the Great War. Always remember we're burned for better, I vowed I would always be yours, 'cause we survived the Great War."

Benedict & Sophie: Enchanted

"This is me praying that this was the very first page, not where the storyline ends. My thoughts will echo your name until I see you again. These are the words I held back as I was leaving to soon. I was enchanted to meet you."

Colin & Penelope: You Belong With Me (🥹)

"Dreaming 'bout the day when you wake up and find that what you're looking for has been here the whole time. If you could see that I'm the one who understands you, been here all along so why can't you see, you belong with me."

Eloise & Phillip: seven

"I've been meaning to tell you I think your house is haunted, your dad is always mad and that must be why. I think you should come live with me and we can be pirates, then you won't have to cry, or hide in the closet, and just like a folk song, our love will be passed on."

Francesca & Michael / Michaela: I Almost Do

"I bet you think I either moved on or I hate you, 'cause every time you reach out there's no reply. I bet it never ever occurred to you, that I can't say hello to you and risk another goodbye. And I just want to tell you, it takes everything in me not to call you, and I wish I could run to you, and I hope you know that every time I don't, I almost do."

Hyacinth & Gareth: I Can See You

"I can see you in your suit and your necktie, pass me a note saying "meet me tonight", then we kiss and you know I won't ever tell. And I can see you being my addiction, you can see me as a secret mission, hide away and I will stop behaving myself."

Gregory & Lucy: Speak Now (duh)

"I hear the preacher say speak now or forever hold your peace. There's the silence, there's my last chance, I stand up with shaky breath all eyes on me. Horrified looks from everyone in the room but I'm only looking at you."

[damianbugs]

thinking about a fic where duke gets de aged to eight years old memories and all so he wakes up thinking its still zero year. cass and tim are like wuh oh we need to handle this make sure he doesn't panic and are trying to figure out the best way to approach this when bruce without saying anything just removes his cowl and kneels down to duke all "it's nice to see you again, duke" and duke's like "mr wayne! what happened! did the riddler catch us? what are you — i knew you were batman!"

the others are like what the fuck. what's happening here? and this is how they find out the only reason bruce is currently alive is because duke and doug thomas fished his comatose ass out of gotham harbour and elaine thomas nursed him back to health for like a month. jason thinks this is absolutely hilarious. damian is very impressed.

[trash-for-manhwa-and-manga]

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY TO MY BELOVED MANHWA MOMS 🫶

[autismsupermusicalassassin]

after all of the different AU of Miguel x reader, or Oscar Isaac characters x reader ,non of them try to do a WICKED AU (musical) where the reader is elphaba and Miguel/or other Oscar characters are fiyero type characters in the au fic…but who knows that’s just probably me excited to see the WICKED movie musical coming out this year (part one)

[thecrownedmage]

THE GRAND MASQUERADE

[moonytoastatmidnight]

No Good Deed from Wicked but it's Miss Holloway and she's both mourning and trying to save Duke and mourning all the kids she couldn't save do you see the vision

[habadoo]

My top Isekai/roFan webcomics (I have read far too many) (and will continue to do so)

Who made me a princess. Gorgeous art and gorgeous story.

The Fantasie of A Stepmother. Also gorgeous art, and a beautiful story. Focus on found family, with a smart protagonist. (I'm obsessed with Nora and Shuri).

The Wicked Tale of Cinderella's Stepmom. One of my favourites. MC wakes up in the body of Mildred, the mother of two daughters and her step-daughter Cinderella. The relationship between the girls and our MC is so well written, and the romance is *chef's kiss*. It's more Josie vibes, and has a realistic portrayal of aristocratic society. MC is a mama bear; don't get on her bad side!

Why Raeliana Left The Duke's Mansion. This now has an anime adaptation, for good reason. MC and ML are smart, and now writing this list I want to go re-read it haha.

The Perks of Being an S Class Heroine. This one is hilarious, and the plot and pacing is so good. It starts with a tutorial period with all the MC's as kids first, so the romance isn't central so far, but I love our FL and the plot and all the characters are interesting.

Wall of Glass. Okay this one is historical rather than fantasy BUT it is so good highly recommend if you want a more realistic portrayal of the class system (I think it's set in Victorian England). Our FL is a noble lady who gets a big wake up when her father sadly dies and their estate is bankrupt, so she has to work and earn money. ML is the opposite - he is a commoner who has worked his way up and hates the nobility. They first meet when she's a noble, then later when she's a governess. (If you happen to like the book North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell I recommend this comic & vice versa. If you like Austen then PLEASE read North and South!).

Villains Are Destined To Die. I absolutely love Penelope and Callisto's dynamic, and I really like our MC. They just work so well together. I like Callisto's sardonic personality. (Also, he's a major simp for her. Literally jumps blind into danger for her; and he feels safe with her because he knows she's got his back too.) CW for abusive parent/siblings - not physical, but emotional and neglectful, and I think the MC has an unhealthy relationship with food. Because of her abuse she is malnourished and has gut problems (mentioned in her past life), and when she's anxious/stressed she completely forgets to eat, but all of this is discussed in the novel. The fact that Penelope dismisses it as no big deal is questioned by other characters, such as our devastatingly handsome ML. The plot/world lore is hella also interesting.

[elizabeth-wayne-official]

Good morning, Lizbeth

At least it wasn't the sun in my bedroom at 3am again.

Good morning, Duke. How are you today?

[insaneclownpossearchive]

[bridgerton-bard]

Bridgerton Audiobooks Included with Spotify Premium

I just thought I would put out a note to let anyone who was unaware that all of the audiobooks in the Bridge-verse written by Julia Quinn are now free to download/stream for Spotify Premium subscribers.

Obviously this isn't paid promotion, but if you had wanted to pick them up, this is a great time if you're a spotify subscriber. I was surprised they were included due to the popularity of the show, but they're all there. I'm currently listening to To Sir Phillip, With Love.

Happy listening! 😘