This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Mickey Mouse has long symbolized corporate efforts to control copyrighted material. As of January 1, an early version of the character is at last in the public domain. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: A Big Step for Mousekind An early version of Mickey Mouse may soon be everywhere: on shirts, in movies, onstage making crude remarks and shaking his hips in little white trousers (actually, John Oliver already had an actor do that on his show). As of Monday, the iteration of Mickey Mouse from the 1928 movie Steamboat Willie—the mischievous rodent who uses a goose as a trombone—is available in the public domain in America. Later depictions of the character are still under copyright. But the change is a major moment that Disney fought hard to postpone. In 1998, Congress extended copyright periods for …