At the beginning of every new year in America, a tsunami of copyrights expire, leading to a great rummaging through once-protected content. Naturally, that’s the case this year—but it’s also the 132nd anniversary of the first film known to have been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office back on Jan. 9, 1894.

The application for this seminal copyright was filed by William K. L. Dickson, an assistant of Thomas Edison, for a five-second film entitled Fred Ott’s Sneeze. The action consists of an Edison employee, Ott, sneezing. Credit for the film went to Dickson as its producer and director (clout chaser) and to its titular star, Ott, who would later appear in the film’s lesser-known follow-up Fred Ott Holding a Bird.

The fact that Dickson obtained a copyright for the film is significant not because the sneeze itself was remarkable, but because the paperwork was. In filing that claim, Dickson helped establish cinema—such as it was—as defensible intellectual property, subject to the same protections as literature and drama. In doing so, Dickson helped clear the runway for filmmaking to become a profession and movies to become a monetizable medium, thus achieving the holy trinity that continues to fuel much of our culture today: art, technology, and commerce.

Later that same year, Dickson created another cultural landmark—the world’s first cat video. Professor Welton’s Boxing Cats (another exquisitely literal title) features a pair of felines in a doll-sized boxing ring wearing tiny boxing gloves (the titular professor was on hand to puppeteer the promised pugilism). A hundred and thirty-two years later, Pet Influencer Secrets—a site that promises to “help humans make their pets FAMOUS!”—suggests that similar videos can command up to a seven-figure annual income.

What separates the boxing cats from today’s algorithm-fed pet stardom isn’t creativity so much as how copyright once functioned in practice.

For most of the 20th century, copyright was not automatic in the United States. Until the 1976 Copyright Act took effect in 1978, protection depended on publication with proper notice and compliance with formalities. Miss a step and the work could fall straight into the public domain (such was the fate of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead). The 1976 Act marked the first major shift: copyright attached the moment a work was fixed in a tangible medium.

At that point, copyright registration still mattered in terms of enforcement, but ownership of a work wasn’t pegged on properly filing one’s paperwork. In the 80s, Reagan—who famously declared ketchup a vegetable (it’s a fruit!)—finally deigned to adhere to an 180-nation-strong international copyright convention that had been in effect for over a century. With the signing of the Berne Convention, copyright notice (i.e., this guy: ©) was no longer required to qualify for protection.

Of course, there have been countless copyright challenges since the 80s—sampling in hip-hop, fair use in documentaries, “safe harbors” for online service providers from user infringement (hello, YouTube), and now the wholesale inhaling of copyrighted corpora by AI companies for their large language models.

Books, articles, photographs, scripts, cat videos have all been poached under the theory that training was either non-infringing, fair use, or simply too technically abstract to regulate. The work was no longer exploited as work but as raw material, stripped of attribution, license, or payment. Now, you don’t need a cat to make a cat video—just an AI platform that references millions of other cat videos to make one for you.

Culture has always been monetized through ownership—until now. AI isn’t the end of creativity or copyright per se but it’s important to realize that the extraction of value in the creative economy no longer happens at the artist-owner level. It’s increasingly upstream, by the entities for whom your creative work is training data. 

As always, art, technology, and commerce remain inseparable—but only one of those three is particularly good at looking after its own interests. Pick one. Meow.