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TIL Disney successfully lobbied Congress to extend the length of copyright protection in order to prevent Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain. The law was later referred to as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act

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5VVP9 TIL of Heinrich Schliemann, an amateur archeologist who located the ancient city of Troy in the 1870s among other feats. Modern archeologists disapprove of his methods - using dynamite to blow up the site and looking through the debris.
YpjYG TIL in 2003 voters in Georgia approved the adoption the Confederate flag as the Flag of Georgia with the only change being the addition of a yellow state seal
QJYrM TIL of Emmanuel Nwude, a Nigerian scammer who managed to sell a fake airport to a Brazilian bank for $242 million between 1995 and 1998.
MeA1A TIL of Hellfire Clubs, 18th century social clubs, extant in UK, where men and women gathered to perform socially unacceptable actions while simultaneously mocking religion, satirically, in a time when it was blasphemous to do so.
eGN6 TIL That in South Dakota there is an annual motorcycle rally that averages almost 10 deaths, 400 arrests, 300 emergency room visits, and tens of millions in revenue for local government.