When does Pokémon enter public domain in the US?
7 January 2024 — A Discord user had asked when Pokémon would enter public domain in the US.
Disclaimer: This article is a reproduction of a Discord post I wrote in an informal capacity and thus will not have been fact-checked. Read this article with a critical lens (like you should with anything on the internet).
Copyright terms can be different depending on (1) where you are and (2) who is making the work. For the Pokémon games, they would be considered "works for hire" under US law and works made by corporate bodies under Japanese law.
Under those respective laws, the terms are:
95 years in the US
Even if a work is only published in Japan, it will still receive copyright protection in the US. So it generally does not matter where it gets published, save for the "rule of the shortest term."
Many countries have a "rule of the shortest term." This rule means that if an author's work was published in a country with a shorter copyright term, it will enter public domain at the same time as that country.
Importantly for your question, the US does not have a rule of the shortest term.
To use the Pokémon example, the earliest version of the game is the Japanese edition of Red and Green, published in 1996.
This means that (to my understanding) in:
Japan — Red and Green enter public domain in 2066
the UK and EU — Red and Green also enter public domain in 2066 (because of the rule of the shortest term, even if copyright terms there are longer)
the US — Red and Gree enter public domain in 2091 (because the US does not have the rule of the shorter term)
"Works attributed to an organisation: 70 years after the work is made public (Article 53, paragraph 1)."