Public domainNo copyright claim applies.
Every appearance and version the entry covers has cleared US copyright. There’s no carve-out and no later work still under protection pulling it back — the whole determination is clean, subject only to any separate trademark note (see § 03 below).
How it’s determinedThe publication date of every version in scope is checked against the US fixed-date term wall — 1930 and earlier, as of 2026. One clean pass on every covered version earns this status; if even one falls short, the entry drops to Partially free instead.
Example — Sherlock Holmes →Cleared entirely only in 2023, once Conan Doyle’s final stories aged out too.
Partially free — version dependentNot one answer — a per-version answer.
The character or work isn’t a single yes/no. Specific designs, stories, or editions clear the term while later ones don’t — using the wrong one is exactly the trap this status exists to flag.
How it’s determinedEach distinct version — a design, a story, a specific edition — gets its own term-wall check. The entry’s version-scope field states plainly which ones are free and which aren’t, instead of averaging them into one misleading label.
Example — Mickey Mouse →The 1928 Steamboat Willie design is free; every later redesign isn’t.
ProtectedStill under active rights — full stop.
The version in question hasn’t cleared US copyright, or a live trademark blocks commercial use regardless of copyright status. Nothing here is offered as free to use.
How it’s determinedA publication date after the current term wall, a renewal that kept an older work alive, or an active trademark independent of copyright — any one of these is enough to keep an entry here.
No character in the index carries this status yet — every one seeded so far cleared at least partially. For scale: a character from a book published in 1997 is still decades from the wall this rule uses.
Open