Mickey Mouse is massive. Mickey has been the face of Disney and is sold on and in many products each year. Kids know who he is and adults know who he is. He does seem antiquated now, especially to older adults but I don't see them getting rid of him anytime soon.
Disney doesn't have many characters with that much lasting appeal between age demographics, it links the older generation of Disney with the new.
The version of Mickey Mouse that would become public domain in 2024 bears very little visual similarity to subsequent versions. Still recognizable, but definitely not the same. Only the initial works from that year will be public domain.
You won't be able to recreate Disneyland with this public domain entrance.
Disney has been removing its focus on Mickey Mouse over the years as (I speculate) it knows at some point the mouse will be part of public domain, so it's been going on an IP shopping spree for most of the 2010s.
Mickey is still huge as the peer comment states. Mickey shaped beignets, Mickey hats, Mickey costumes, etc. Just that everything else grew up to have as much, if not more, brand equity than Mickey.
Works featuring Mickey will be public domain, but they'll still have the trademark so it's not like everyone will suddenly be able to sell your own Mickey Mouse merchandise.
I can't remember the source (maybe just a pet theory) but I believe Disney stopped using Mickey because there was so much contention over "Mickey would never do that" among fans so he just became a mascot instead of having him be a character in a story...probably in the 80s-90s.
Near the 2000s the recognizably of Mickey started dropping with young kids so they've put him in more stuff. He started "hosting" things like Mickey's Clubhouse, put him in games like Epic Mickey and Kingdom Hearts, they had a retro redesign about 10 years ago and have used him in a bunch of new stuff including a few theme park rides.
naa, the reason mickey is not as public as he was when he came out is because he became boring and he was overtaken by donald etc. I've followed the game devolopement of Epic Mickey where Warren Specter (producer/director, also of deus ex-fame) had a lot to say about the history of mickey and his take was that in the beginning Mickey was very mischievous but somehow that changed over the years and he basically became boring and all the interesting traits - in the sense of storytelling or character development - where found in other characters (and once mickey had found his boring persona, writers weren't quite allowed to give him back his mischievousness). Mickey became nothing more than an icon.
Disney Animation uses a Steamboat Willie clip as their logo. It's at the front of all of their movies. Technically, its branding and completely separate from copyright.
Does this mean that the Steamboat Willie depiction of Mickey can be used in the public domain? Or just that the movie is free to distribute after that time?
This article explains it thoroughly, Mickey Mouse is protected by copyright, but it also is protected by trademark, which doesn’t has a time limit. There is a comparison with a Peter Rabbit, which entered public domain in 1979 and Zorro. The corporation that owns the brand, successfully used trademark law to stop a third party.
I've continually been stunned that there seems to be no political support for shortening and simplifying copyright terms and increasing the public domain for the good of all. Europe used to have what I'd consider a pretty common sense general term (at least for music) of 50 years after release. But even they abandoned that for reasons I can't understand. Everyone benefits from the public domain, so how can laws limiting it drastically be passed with little resistance?
This is a pretty common phenomenon with laws that benefit a powerful minority but are largely opaque or obscure to the public at large. The minority lobbies for ever-more favorable laws for themselves, but there's no countering force; or if it is, it's not as strong. See also agricultural subsidies or fossil fuel subsidies.
If you have money, it is easier to lobby for something that will make you more money. If you have no money, it is more difficult to lobby to keep something free.
Ethanol mandates are an excellent example. Completely stupid policy -- better to literally just pay farmers to do nothing -- but still, it lives on, because Iowa is the first state in the primaries.
And this includes scientific papers published by US government scientists -- journals can't call copyright on those and so they are open access even if the journal isn't. Unfortunately this only works if all the authors are government. If it is a collaboration between government scientists and those in a university or company, this loophole doesn't hold.
Poland has quite obvious law that government documents are not protected by copyright.
Interestingly, in recent years it gets more and more broadly applied, for example to database listing schools and to aerial imagery taken on a government contracts.
What is quite nice if you want to use them for example as a source for OpenStreetMap edits.
1) most people get their information from media sources that profit from copyrights.
2) academics profit from copyrights.
Therefore little research is done to showing how copyrights and patents are bad for equality and the economy, and the work that is done receives little to no attention in the media (which doesn't want to go hunting for new business models to replace their current profits)
3) The industry has done a great job at marketing copyrights and patents as intellectual "property rights", even though it is in fact the exact opposite of property rights (property rights and copyrights/patents are logically incompatible). You have to hand it to them, dishonest but effective.
How do you solve this?
1. You need to reach a large number of people via channels outside the copyright driven media (and we have that now—twitter!)
2. You need research and data that shows how bad these things are (and we have that now—the China miracle; the open source revolution; the research revolution powered by scihub; the horrific track record of patents in medicine)
3. You need to start effectively marketing to the people and change the perception of these laws. Someone on HN brought up the term "Imaginary Property" as an alternative to "Intellectual Property". I think it's catchy and will grow.
My estimate is abolishing copyright and patents would be worth $100,000+'s for every person in America. I think it would be the single best thing we could do for our educational, healthcare, and media systems. I think the time has finally come when we can start spreading the word.
Copyright within the EU got so bad that a lot of teachers are not allowed to make physical copies of a single page in the book they would use to give their students as homework.
So, literally, the school must license the whole book for each potential copy they would make - a year in advance. And that is such a drain on finances for the education sector (which is so underfunded even without that new problem), it's absurd.
We as a society artificially dumb our children down. And for what? That the author doesn't get anything for it anyways?
> We as a society artificially dumb our children down. And for what? That the author doesn't get anything for it anyways?
For surplus value. It is the capitalist class that is dumbing down our children. I absolutely agree with your argument, but disagree that the working class have chosen to do this. It's the bourgeois class; what Professor Jakob Rigi calls: 'knowledge capitalists'. It is the capitalist system that is continuing to plunder the commons, and unfortunately capitalist enclosure is nothing new. Hopefully we can continue to organize to help make people aware of the contradictions of capitalism, in order to change our production system.
"Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists. Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon. The sea pirates take away by force others` properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge [by the capitalists] is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology. In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is expressed in various ways including the following. First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other. Second, “pirate” activists, so-called crackers, illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books. These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting.
By refusing to pay and using and distributing the product at will the “digital pirate” questions the moral validity of intellectual property. Although rebelious in terms of violating capitalist intellectal property, digital piracy does not touch the capitalist foundation of the production of knowledge. It merely remains a struggle in the realm of distribution. However, it is a very important form of struggle. It contributes to the formation of a new emerging politico-cultural subjectivity of the netizen. It might be true that most “digital pirates” copy items for personal use, however, the involvement of activists such as Swartz and r...
Academic work usually doesn't have a long shelf-life. Textbooks already get replaced every few years. So there's little incentive against advocating for shorter copyright terms that would allow most academics free access to older research materials without impacting their own income.
It sounds like a bad deal for Europe if for instance Taylor Swift’s works get life + 70 years but Ed Sheeran’s works get 50 years. Nationalism is the main reason current copyright laws are seen as reasonable - no country wants to give their citizens a worse deal than another country. I’m afraid shortening copyright lengths would have to be done by international agreement.
That's an individualist and not a society perspective. I think 70 year lock up is a worse deal than 50 for the citizenry in general. So you can flip that. Maybe the artist wants to go to a place with a reduced length of time because it gives them a richer catalog from which to make derivative works (like practically every Disney movie ever made).
The often-used "incentivize innovation" argument can be flipped as well. The luxurious length of time may make our most creative people lazy and thus disincentivizes innovation in the same way that giving a worker, say, 10 million dollars will make them no longer show up for work.
Money.
Not many people are going to lobby for something to be free. And you have companies like Disney claiming they can create jobs, so it is good for the people.
I think the public at large cares little for “ancient” works from 1925, because that was such a different age. There is a great cultural disconnect. We typically don’t feel those works were ours in the first place. So we don’t see a great benefit in suddenly having free access to them.
This will change. I believe our current cultural continuity reaches all the way back to the end of the Second World War, and that this continuity is a stretching window not a sliding window.
When works from 1945+ start to enter the public domain I think the public at large will recognize these as part of their own cultural continuity and start to appreciate the value of the public domain.
One of the main arguments for the Sony Bono Act of 1998 was: [1]
> The term extension was supported for two key reasons. First, "copyright industries give us [(the United States)] one of our most significant trade surpluses." Second, the recently enacted legislation in the European Union had extended copyright there for 20 years, and so EU works would be protected for 20 years longer than US works if the US did not enact similar term extensions. Howard Coble also stated that it was good for consumers since "When works are protected by copyright, they attract investors who can exploit the work for profit."
> The term extension portion was supported by Songwriters Guild of America, National Academy of Songwriters, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Intellectual Property Law Section of the American Bar Association, the Recording Industry Association of America, National Music Publishers Association, the Information Technology Association of America and others.
The E.U. extension pertained to recordings of performances and was meant to harmonize with the copyright terms of authors for whom a copyright term of 70 years already applied.
Moreover, copyright protection in the E.U. doesn't take the "date of publication" as starting point, but the year of death of the author. It means that in the E.U., to this day, works - works of art, music, photographs, posters, postcards,... - made in the 19th century can still be protected if the author passed after 1950. It also means that clearing copyright in the E.U. is a huge obstacle for archives and libraries when when it comes to opening up their collections.
The main incentives for copyright protection are economic and geostrategic. Paradoxically, in a global, digitized world, copyright protections have gained even more strategic value in trade agreements.
Corruption. Those who profit on it have too much control over legislature. They extended copyright to insane lengths and they'll fight toot and nail against reducing it.
At least they should stop copyright once the authors dies. I understand that the creator deserves fair compensation, but why would relatives or companies who bought the copyright make a living from some dead person's work? To me it makes no sense, people should be paid for their own work based on their own merits.
But even during lifetime 20 or 30 years would be more reasonable. As much as I sympathize with people who make substantial money off a Christmas song they wrote 40 years ago, the idea of lifelong support already seems a bit exaggerated.
If memory serves me, and it’s late so I don’t want to go research right now, original copyright in the US was 20 years + 20 more if the author was still alive.
You want works to outlast a person in the pathological (edge) case, which the old law supported because, if you’re an author and you release your most recent work a year before you die, you want the spouse you leave behind to profit despite your absence.
Imagine being a sick old man that wants to write one last book and some carnivorous movie company refuses to pay you for the movie rights because you’re about to die anyway. That’s not really protecting the author as copyright is intended.
> I've continually been stunned that there seems to be no political support for shortening and simplifying copyright terms and increasing the public domain for the good of all.
While this issue persists mostly for old copyrighted staff, a lot of newly created Public Domain works could be grabbed from OpenClipArt.org, OpenGameArt.org and similar sites.
> But even they abandoned that for reasons I can't understand.
The answer is if you cannot understand why something like this happened, then most likely it means money changed hands. There is a strong lobby that is milking the copyright situation and what it is to them to pay some underpaid career politicians to ensure the status quo or even squeeze it a bit more?
A centralised government means it's easy for rich companies to pay-to-win.
I think we shouldn't have copyright enshrined in law and just use 2 parties contract to prevent copies (eg. I purchased/accessed this from you, I promise I won't copy or you can sue me in a private court).
Sure, it's not the same level of protection but copyright is proportionally useful to how useful / how much money you can make.
By doing this, you're giving freedom to experiment to everyone, remove legal friction in society and successful products (which are more likely to attract clones and piracy) will have a bit less revenue. Not a bad deal in my book.
A part of the explanation might be that some copyrighted materials are considered part of a countries culture, and they don't want their culture to become diluted by the material becoming public domain. In other words, it's an attempt to keep cultures from merging or dissipating. You can argue about whether that's a good or a bad idea.
With music, there are different time periods for the song and the performance, so for example, there are a few of Ella Fitzgerald songs that became public domain last year.
However, the actual recordings are not necessarily public domain yet (some are, some aren't public domain simultaneously). The music is however, so you can do your own version of them if you want. My specific example might have flaws since I only chose Ella because it's the first example I remember from last year's public domain releases, but that was the gist of what I was reading about the issues with music ownership specifically.
I suspect something similar will happen when it comes to characters like Mickey Mouse. And of course, in 2024 you would theoretically only have access to the first version of Mickey, which looks totally different than later iterations.
You get a similar thing with translations. Franz Kafka’s The Trial, for example, will become public domain next year in the original German, but most well regarded English translations will remain under copyright for decades.
And then Tillis' (Disney) Historical Preservation Copyright Act of 2023 will make sure we won't see that in our lifetimes.
(But seriously, just look at the absolute absurdity that Tillis is trying to push through right now as an example of how broken and backward copyright in this country is. If the companies keep getting their way, there will never be a such thing as a public domain going forward.)
From all things we can benefit from public domain, I think the ugly mouse is the most useless. People should just give Disney a "forever copyright" on the ugly mouse so that they would let everything else alone.
A good time to remind everyone to dedicate works (they own) to the public domain or under a non-commerical license through Wikipedia Commons [0] or other such websites [1].
I wish Wikipedia had some form of collaboration with Google/Facebook (like Flickr once did) to let people dedicate frictionlessly their media work under CC-NC licenses since literally everyone with a phone can shoot decent enough media these days. There are several Wikipedia pages that are missing pictures but you'd find plenty on Google Maps (user uploaded) that you couldn't use freely.
In India, all media work published before 60 years is in public domain (< 1960). Here's a nice overview of copyright laws of various countries relegating works to the public domain [2].
57 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadDisney doesn't have many characters with that much lasting appeal between age demographics, it links the older generation of Disney with the new.
You won't be able to recreate Disneyland with this public domain entrance.
Mickey is still huge as the peer comment states. Mickey shaped beignets, Mickey hats, Mickey costumes, etc. Just that everything else grew up to have as much, if not more, brand equity than Mickey.
Near the 2000s the recognizably of Mickey started dropping with young kids so they've put him in more stuff. He started "hosting" things like Mickey's Clubhouse, put him in games like Epic Mickey and Kingdom Hearts, they had a retro redesign about 10 years ago and have used him in a bunch of new stuff including a few theme park rides.
https://www.gandb.com/2019/08/steamboat-willie-mickey-mouse-...
Remember when hacker news had people on it who did such things :) Because I don't :)
Make ethanol from sugar cane, not corn. Louisiana should be the center of US ethanol production. Much higher EROEI.
Interestingly, in recent years it gets more and more broadly applied, for example to database listing schools and to aerial imagery taken on a government contracts.
What is quite nice if you want to use them for example as a source for OpenStreetMap edits.
I think it's for 3 reasons:
1) most people get their information from media sources that profit from copyrights.
2) academics profit from copyrights.
Therefore little research is done to showing how copyrights and patents are bad for equality and the economy, and the work that is done receives little to no attention in the media (which doesn't want to go hunting for new business models to replace their current profits)
3) The industry has done a great job at marketing copyrights and patents as intellectual "property rights", even though it is in fact the exact opposite of property rights (property rights and copyrights/patents are logically incompatible). You have to hand it to them, dishonest but effective.
How do you solve this?
1. You need to reach a large number of people via channels outside the copyright driven media (and we have that now—twitter!)
2. You need research and data that shows how bad these things are (and we have that now—the China miracle; the open source revolution; the research revolution powered by scihub; the horrific track record of patents in medicine)
3. You need to start effectively marketing to the people and change the perception of these laws. Someone on HN brought up the term "Imaginary Property" as an alternative to "Intellectual Property". I think it's catchy and will grow.
My estimate is abolishing copyright and patents would be worth $100,000+'s for every person in America. I think it would be the single best thing we could do for our educational, healthcare, and media systems. I think the time has finally come when we can start spreading the word.
So, literally, the school must license the whole book for each potential copy they would make - a year in advance. And that is such a drain on finances for the education sector (which is so underfunded even without that new problem), it's absurd.
We as a society artificially dumb our children down. And for what? That the author doesn't get anything for it anyways?
For surplus value. It is the capitalist class that is dumbing down our children. I absolutely agree with your argument, but disagree that the working class have chosen to do this. It's the bourgeois class; what Professor Jakob Rigi calls: 'knowledge capitalists'. It is the capitalist system that is continuing to plunder the commons, and unfortunately capitalist enclosure is nothing new. Hopefully we can continue to organize to help make people aware of the contradictions of capitalism, in order to change our production system.
"Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists. Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon. The sea pirates take away by force others` properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge [by the capitalists] is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology. In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is expressed in various ways including the following. First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other. Second, “pirate” activists, so-called crackers, illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books. These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting.
By refusing to pay and using and distributing the product at will the “digital pirate” questions the moral validity of intellectual property. Although rebelious in terms of violating capitalist intellectal property, digital piracy does not touch the capitalist foundation of the production of knowledge. It merely remains a struggle in the realm of distribution. However, it is a very important form of struggle. It contributes to the formation of a new emerging politico-cultural subjectivity of the netizen. It might be true that most “digital pirates” copy items for personal use, however, the involvement of activists such as Swartz and r...
Academic work usually doesn't have a long shelf-life. Textbooks already get replaced every few years. So there's little incentive against advocating for shorter copyright terms that would allow most academics free access to older research materials without impacting their own income.
The often-used "incentivize innovation" argument can be flipped as well. The luxurious length of time may make our most creative people lazy and thus disincentivizes innovation in the same way that giving a worker, say, 10 million dollars will make them no longer show up for work.
However, under the rule of the shorter term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_the_shorter_term), the US would be allowed to reduce Ed Sheeran's copyright to 50 years.
This will change. I believe our current cultural continuity reaches all the way back to the end of the Second World War, and that this continuity is a stretching window not a sliding window.
When works from 1945+ start to enter the public domain I think the public at large will recognize these as part of their own cultural continuity and start to appreciate the value of the public domain.
They're the tunes that grandma remembers listening to in her childhood.
In 30 years, grandma will be dead, and the cultural heritage will be the tunes mom remembers listening to in her childhood.
One of the main arguments for the Sony Bono Act of 1998 was: [1]
> The term extension was supported for two key reasons. First, "copyright industries give us [(the United States)] one of our most significant trade surpluses." Second, the recently enacted legislation in the European Union had extended copyright there for 20 years, and so EU works would be protected for 20 years longer than US works if the US did not enact similar term extensions. Howard Coble also stated that it was good for consumers since "When works are protected by copyright, they attract investors who can exploit the work for profit."
> The term extension portion was supported by Songwriters Guild of America, National Academy of Songwriters, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Intellectual Property Law Section of the American Bar Association, the Recording Industry Association of America, National Music Publishers Association, the Information Technology Association of America and others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
The E.U. extension pertained to recordings of performances and was meant to harmonize with the copyright terms of authors for whom a copyright term of 70 years already applied.
Moreover, copyright protection in the E.U. doesn't take the "date of publication" as starting point, but the year of death of the author. It means that in the E.U., to this day, works - works of art, music, photographs, posters, postcards,... - made in the 19th century can still be protected if the author passed after 1950. It also means that clearing copyright in the E.U. is a huge obstacle for archives and libraries when when it comes to opening up their collections.
The main incentives for copyright protection are economic and geostrategic. Paradoxically, in a global, digitized world, copyright protections have gained even more strategic value in trade agreements.
But even during lifetime 20 or 30 years would be more reasonable. As much as I sympathize with people who make substantial money off a Christmas song they wrote 40 years ago, the idea of lifelong support already seems a bit exaggerated.
You want works to outlast a person in the pathological (edge) case, which the old law supported because, if you’re an author and you release your most recent work a year before you die, you want the spouse you leave behind to profit despite your absence.
Imagine being a sick old man that wants to write one last book and some carnivorous movie company refuses to pay you for the movie rights because you’re about to die anyway. That’s not really protecting the author as copyright is intended.
While this issue persists mostly for old copyrighted staff, a lot of newly created Public Domain works could be grabbed from OpenClipArt.org, OpenGameArt.org and similar sites.
The answer is if you cannot understand why something like this happened, then most likely it means money changed hands. There is a strong lobby that is milking the copyright situation and what it is to them to pay some underpaid career politicians to ensure the status quo or even squeeze it a bit more?
I think we shouldn't have copyright enshrined in law and just use 2 parties contract to prevent copies (eg. I purchased/accessed this from you, I promise I won't copy or you can sue me in a private court). Sure, it's not the same level of protection but copyright is proportionally useful to how useful / how much money you can make.
By doing this, you're giving freedom to experiment to everyone, remove legal friction in society and successful products (which are more likely to attract clones and piracy) will have a bit less revenue. Not a bad deal in my book.
However, the actual recordings are not necessarily public domain yet (some are, some aren't public domain simultaneously). The music is however, so you can do your own version of them if you want. My specific example might have flaws since I only chose Ella because it's the first example I remember from last year's public domain releases, but that was the gist of what I was reading about the issues with music ownership specifically.
I suspect something similar will happen when it comes to characters like Mickey Mouse. And of course, in 2024 you would theoretically only have access to the first version of Mickey, which looks totally different than later iterations.
(But seriously, just look at the absolute absurdity that Tillis is trying to push through right now as an example of how broken and backward copyright in this country is. If the companies keep getting their way, there will never be a such thing as a public domain going forward.)
I wish Wikipedia had some form of collaboration with Google/Facebook (like Flickr once did) to let people dedicate frictionlessly their media work under CC-NC licenses since literally everyone with a phone can shoot decent enough media these days. There are several Wikipedia pages that are missing pictures but you'd find plenty on Google Maps (user uploaded) that you couldn't use freely.
In India, all media work published before 60 years is in public domain (< 1960). Here's a nice overview of copyright laws of various countries relegating works to the public domain [2].
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
[1] https://unsplash.com/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain