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On the first day of 2023, “Steamboat Willie,” the 1928 short film featuring early versions of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, entered the public domain in the United States, meaning that other creators can now use and remix these versions without needing to pay royalties—or even ask permission. Web3 has not been slow to take advantage—with a number of Steamboat Willie NFTs and meme tokens enjoying a brief spate of high prices and volume.
First off the mark, at the stroke of midnight ET, was a Manifold edition of a still from the film featuring Mickey at the wheel of his steamboat. Created by Truth Labs co-founder Alexander Taub, the 2000-count edition minted for .001 and sold out within a few hours.
Topping OpenSea’s volume chart, the edition has zero royalties, has traded over 611 ETH in volume as of January 2, and peaked at a Jan. 1 floor price of .4 ETH.
Other NFT luminaries joined in the celebrations, including calligrapher Sarah Script, who made a Mickey in her signature style, and Beeple, who drew a trio of Mickeys holding Bitcoin as his first everyday artwork of 2024.
In the United States, copyright expires after 95 years. Other notable works entering the public domain in 2024 are A.A. Milne’s “The House At Pooh Corner,” in which Tigger makes his debut, and Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.” For proponents of public domain, Disney content copyright expiring is particularly symbolic, because Disney went to the U.S. Congress twice—in 1984 and 2004—to extend the copyright for its characters.
To the NFT community, the issues of creative freedom and control that made many artists move into web3 make Steamboat Willie’s move into the public domain resonate strongly.
“I think seeing iconic parts of history go into public domain is something that is exciting because it opens the floodgates of creative possibilities,” AI artist Nuclear Samurai told nft now.
Fellow artist rocketgirlNFT agrees. “Steamboat Willie threw silent animation into the history books and launched a whole new meta. The NFT space has taken this same pioneering spirit and birthed legion tributes and a meme coin that steamboated to multiple millions on the first day of the year,” she told us.
However, some observers want to steer towards originality and more creative uses of the public domain rather than simply putting a frame from a film onto Manifold. “Veve already made official Disney Steamboat Willie NFTs 2 years ago. I don’t know if there is any value coming from random people minting Steamboat Willie NFTs,” said artist and collector mLow.
Several Steamboat Willie-themed meme tokens have emerged alongside the NFTs, including $WILLIE and $MICKEY.
Launched yesterday, $WILLIE, an ERC-20 token, features a black and white Mickey Mouse on its website and innumerable willie jokes on its X account. As of January 2nd, it has a market cap of $9.5 million. On Solana, $MICKEY has a more modest $500,000 market cap as of this writing.
