4 ms·
This article is making a big legal mistake I think... You should be free to make a Mickey Mouse doll with modern colors and white gloves after Steamboat Willie
by riskable 8y ago
This article is making a big legal mistake I think... You should be free to make a Mickey Mouse doll with modern colors and white gloves after Steamboat Willie enters the public domain because those would be derivative works (of the original). The colors of the character's clothes can certainly be trademarked but after the initial copyright expires any and all color combinations should be fair game (legally speaking).
If this were not the case the entire body of case law on derivative works would be turned on its head. The entire point of derivative works law is that there's an original that everything else is based on. If the original is public domain any variation thereof is also public domain from that point forward except for exact replicas.
Meaning: You can produce all the Mickey Mouse stuff you want as long as you're not literally copying something that's still under copyright. Mickey Mouse dolls are fine as long as your artwork wasn't literally copied & pasted.
- fattire 8y agoI was thinking the same thing re: derivative works. Ordinarily a claim could be made if you took a copyrighted work and created derivative material from it (someone sampling your hook in a new song), but what if you start from a public domain work, and add your own changes? It seems your changes only would be copyrighted. But can you copyright obvious colors? If you took B&W, public domain Mickey and had some preschoolers or an AI or something color it in... would this be yours? What Disney should worry about if they plan to defend their colored Mickey is a team of hacktivists creating derivative colored works from the original pd B&W image and claiming copyright on THAT for another 100 years :)
- gowld 8y agoYou can only copyright works of creativity. Changing someones shirt color to non-specific non-interesting shade of red would be a challenging claim to defend.
- lucasverra 8y agoWhat if i make, market and sell (in 2024) a doll with just a pixel (or point) of a different colour (assume green on red pants) and argue that point of green showcase a different mickey, with eco friendly thoughts ? Every thing else would be very similar
- byte1918 8y agoYour intent to mislead is obvious and I don't think it would hold up in court at all. But IANAL and copyright laws are different from country to country.
- jdietrich 8y agoA judge will be annoyed and/or amused. You will lose a lawsuit. It will be expensive.
- nkrisc 8y agoJudges aren't computers and won't be fooled by that. They are humans who are very familiar with humans attempting to deceive.
- opencl 8y agoIt will end exactly as well as the people that tried to claim MP3 encodings of music are "psycho-acoustic simulations" of the original and thus not subject to the copyright. https://www.wired.com/2011/03/psycho-acoustic-beatles/ https://www.wired.com/2011/03/psycho-acoustic-beatles/
- nl 8y agoAre you a lawyer? I'm not but I work with lots, and that's not how derivative works are interpreted. You may think it's right and the logic is sound, but there are good arguments the other way too, and that is how courts have found.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoYou're ignoring all the copyrighted movies Disney made based off of public domain works. Good luck just "deriving" off of those too much. With your Steamboat Willie argument, derivative work would have to be based off him, not from works based off him (ie Mickey Mouse).
- Buge 8y agoThere's copyright law and trademark law. Copyright law might be ok with something but trademark law might ban it. The ban takes precedence.
- PovilasID 8y agoBut would the burden of proof be on the producer or the claimant? Also: I don't want to test if Disney's lawyers can bankrupt my small toyshop just by drawing out the legal process.