Words are (1) public domain, and (2) eligible to be trademarks.<p>Suppose you make paper, but instead of white, it&#x27;s light blue. You sell it under the brand &quot;Blue Paper&quot;. You can (I believe) trademark that (for example, your logo probably has the words in a particular font), but you can&#x27;t stop anyone else from selling blue paper as &quot;Blue Paper&quot;, because that&#x27;s purely descriptive of the product.<p>Similarly, once a video featuring Mickey Mouse is out of copyright, it&#x27;s perfectly OK for people to sell that video. And it seems to me that they could defend using an image of Mickey Mouse on the packaging, under the same logic -- despite the fact that the image of Mickey is trademarked by Disney for the purpose of selling cartoons. It&#x27;s not obvious that the trademark is actually protective there.