This January 1st saw another incredible trove of cultural treasures rise into the public domain as their 95-year copyright terms finally expired. Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain is always a great place to learn more about what’s newly entered our shared cultural commons, and this year their deep dive on Popeye the Sailor is especially fun. Based on some research in the online records of the Copyright Office, they explain that, contrary to what you might have read elsewhere, Popeye’s love for spinach (which, yes, is something copyright can arguably encumber – who knew?) is also free for all to use. It’s worth pausing to mourn the loss of the legal provision that put Popeye’s spinach-power in the public domain more than half a century before the sailor himself: copyright renewal.

Copyright renewal was a simple idea: after an initial term of protection (28 years) a copyright holder would have to renew their copyright to claim the remaining term. If they don’t renew, the work rises into the public domain. Empirical studies have shown that needlessly long copyright terms actually make works disappear, and in the era when renewal was required, most works were not renewed. While copyright could last a long time, in practice it often ended after a few decades. Copyright renewal was a win-win: any copyright holder that wanted to could get the full term of copyright, while the public gets the opportunity to freely share and reuse the vast majority of works whose copyright holders can’t be bothered with this simple process. It works well for federally registered trademarks, which must be renewed every 10 years or else expire, and for two centuries it set the vast majority of copyrighted works free after a reasonable initial term. That’s what happened with Popeye’s spinach power, which was first depicted in 1931 in a comic strip whose copyright was not renewed in 1959; the spinach has been free for 65 years, while the sailor remained in-copyright until last week. So what happened?

Renewal was a casualty of the US’s effort to remove copyright “formalities” (which includes registration and notice, both of which were made optional). Ending renewal (which was not required for any work published after 1964) and other formalities has left millions of works stranded in copyright long after their owners lost interest in exploiting them, creating an “orphan works” problem that the US Copyright Office has called “widespread and significant,” creating uncertainty and doubt that “do not serve the goals of the copyright system.” If renewal were still required, the vast majority of works published prior to 1996 would be joining the public domain this year, alongside works from nearly a century ago. Digital humanist scholar Ted Underwood recently compared Public Domain Day to “the opening of an Egyptian tomb.” If copyright renewal were still the law, it’d be more like booting up a Pentium PC– charmingly retro, not ancient.