Poll of the Day > Winnie the Pooh is now public domain

(+) Yeah! (+)

Not the Disney version, but the original A.A. Milne version.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/6/2/AAQwHjAACxgW.jpg

Oh hey, you're right.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67098

Finally time to release my Pooh bear horror movie

How long now until the mouse is Public Domain?

Judgmenl posted...

How long now until the mouse is Public Domain?

Internets said in 2 years, assuming Didney don't lawyer another decade on to it.

And with this topic, I realised Judgmenl has me blocked :(

DeltaBladeX posted...

And with this topic, I realised Judgmenl has me blocked :(

Why would he block you?

No clue. But I can only see their post as a quote.

Wow

Thats kind of weird

dragon504 posted...

Internets said in 2 years, assuming Didney don't lawyer another decade on to it.

Which would be fucking insane, tbh. Something like that should never in the public domain.

Judgmenl posted...

How long now until the mouse is Public Domain?

Never, if Disney's lawyers have their way. They've already got copyright law changed several times to keep their hold on their IPs.

darkknight109 posted...

Never, if Disney's lawyers have their way. They've already got copyright law changed several times to keep their hold on their IPs.

This.

The thing people forget about public domain is that rights issues and ownership are far more complicated than most people realize. There are still ways to tie characters or IP up in ways that make it functionally impossible to really use even if something is public domain and you should be able to use it.



darkknight109 posted...

Never, if Disney's lawyers have their way. They've already got copyright law changed several times to keep their hold on their IPs.

It's been implied that they're sort of running out of the necessary clout/excuses to keep pulling it off, though.

It's part of the theory why they started doing the live-action remake movies, because it gives them an opening to essentially backdoor new rights claims on characters and ideas from the original cartoons without having to keep the old cartoons themselves locked down.

We're talking about a company that sued a kindergarten for painting Disney characters on the walls of a classroom here. They're not going to just quietly let their IP lapse into public domain and let people do whatever they want with it whenever they want. Lawyers and loopholes abound.

I dont need shit to go public to draw crude versions of it:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/2/4/AAckHXAACxsQ.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/2/7/AAckHXAACxsT.jpg

You can just imagine what the pen is hiding. And whatever youre imagining double its size.

Lmao that meme that's a top tier nerd meme imo

DeltaBladeX posted...

And with this topic, I realised Judgmenl has me blocked :(

Looks like he blocked me too that's random lmao

HornedLion posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/2/4/AAckHXAACxsQ.jpg

It's like if Mickey Mouse had a cousin with a terrible addiction to drugs and would be willing to mug people to satiate his unhealthy desires.

@Judgmenl why you have DeltaBladeX and Jen0125 blocked?

FatalAccident posted...

Why would he block you?

Dude blocks everyone.

Zeus posted...

Which would be fucking insane, tbh. Something like that should never in the public domain.

I'm inclined to agree, but I feel like Disney's approach to effecting that is very much not the best. The whole system of stuff passing into public domain simply because it reaches a certain age is definitely harmful and unfair to companies like Disney that are still actively using IP's that are old enough to qualify for that. That Disney is pushing to have that threshold extended, however, is not only not a viable long-term solution (eventually, even Disney's going to run out of justifications), it means people have to wait even longer to legally access stuff that has been genuinely abandoned.

Instead, IP ownership should last indefinitely so long as the IP is being used, but expire after a much shorter period (I tend to default to 10 years for argument's sake, though I'm sure that could be tweaked) of not being used. "Being used" needs some definition, of course, but I'm pretty comfortable defining it as "available for official sale" for individual works and "represented in a work that is available for official sale" for franchises, characters, and any other broader elements (though I'm really not a fan of the idea of patenting/copyrighting game mechanics, like WB did with SoM's Nemesis system). In a pre-digital world, that wasn't necessarily a reasonable standard because maintaining production on a company's entire library simply wasn't a practical idea, but in a world of digital distribution, there's no reason not to make your stuff available for sale unless you don't want to profit from it anymore.

adjl posted...

I'm inclined to agree, but I feel like Disney's approach to effecting that is very much not the best.

The issue that I have is that the entire reason why Disney is one of the biggest companies in the world today is *because* of the public domain. Many of their big feature films, particularly in the formative years of their film department in the 40s-through-60s, were all taken directly from the public domain: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, so on and so forth - all based on books and fairy tales in the public domain.

And that is exactly how it's supposed to work. The entire reason why we created copyright laws in the first place is to balance competing interests - it is in society's interest to have free access to someone's works and the ability to modify and tweak them to improve upon them and ultimately create a superior end product, but it is in an individual's interests to be able to profit off of their own work without having to compete with piggybackers who simply parasitize their product without doing any actual work of their own.

So the original copyright laws were an attempt to strike a balance between that. For the first 20 years after a product was released, the exclusive rights of publication and copying existed with the original creator (or whoever they sold the copyrights to). That gave them two decades of unhindered ability to profit from their work, after which it was assumed that the majority of the profits would have been acquired and anyone else was then free to copy, modify, and distribute it as they pleased.

From an archival perspective, I dislike the idea that a corporate entity can sit on copyrights effectively in perpetuity. Again, this is especially galling given that Disney made their billions off of public domain works and is now effectively trying to "pull up the ladder" behind them. Society's interests are in the free flow of information and free access to creative works and that is not outweighed by Disney's corporate interests in maintaining their monopoly on their creative products. And it's worth noting that any new stories involving Mickey Mouse don't immediately enter the public domain, instead being subject to the usual waiting period (which is, what, 95 years now?), so it's not like Disney loses the right to their character or suddenly can't profit off of him anymore, it's just that others can now derive works based on their stories.

Also also, it's worth clarifying that characters specifically cannot be copyrighted, only the works in which they are featured. Currently the reason why Mickey Mouse cannot be used in non-Disney work isn't because Mickey Mouse the character is copyrighted, but because all works featuring him are privately owned by Disney and he would be considered a fundamental part of those works.

Felix Salton sold the rights to Bambi for $1000 to film producer Sidney Franklin who in turn sold it to Disney. Salton never saw a penny from the cartoon. So screw Disney.

Bambi (the book) became public domain in the US this year also.

If anything I bet Disney revels in this opportunity. Either people will be too afraid to make original content using the Pooh IP for fear of getting onto Disney's radar or Disney will just sue people when they try to publish something using it.

It's not about winning, it's just about getting in peoples' faces and wasting their resources.

Jinping and his poisoned hunny does not approve of this message.

darkknight109 posted...

Never, if Disney's lawyers have their way. They've already got copyright law changed several times to keep their hold on their IPs.

The idea now is they are going to let the copyright expire but keep the trademark (which never expire). What does that mean? Probably that nothing is going to change really, just another loophole for Disney to exploit.

Dikitain posted...

The idea now is they are going to let the copyright expire but keep the trademark (which never expire). What does that mean?

Trademarks are a protection of a company's "brand" - i.e. their logos, slogans, name, etc., whereas copyright is a protection of a specific creative or intellectual work or expression. Much like copyright, specific characters cannot be universally trademarked, except as part of a work (so, for instance, Disney doesn't have a trademark on Mickey Mouse the character, but does have multiple trademarks on him for each medium he's in, from toys to video games to school supplies). And yes, Disney is free to keep their trademark in Mickey in perpetuity, even if the works he's in lapse into the public domain.

Copyright law and trademark law, as well as their intersection with the public domain, gets very tricky very quickly and I would be lying if I said I had an in-depth understanding of it, but my understanding is that if some of the older Disney works featuring Mickey Mouse lapse into public domain, others are free to create copies of that work without modification or may create derivative works (for instance, their own depiction of Steamboat Willie) so long as the work is sufficiently differentiated from Disney's work and nothing is present to suggest that the work was made by or sanctioned by Disney itself. You could keep the character of Mickey Mouse (since he's part of the original story, which is now in the public domain), but you might have to depict him differently than Disney (for the same reason why you can do an animated movie of Cinderella without Disney's permission - public domain story - but you can't draw her the way Disney does).

The governing rule of "trademark" is "likelihood of confusion" - i.e. how likely is someone to confuse your "knock-off" product with the real deal. For instance, let's say I run a plumbing business - I couldn't call it "Starbucks Plumbing" or "Wal-Mart Plumbing", because "Starbucks" and "Wal-Mart" are made-up words that are trademarked by their respective companies. However, I would probably be alright to call it "Apple Plumbing" or "Amazon Plumbing" - even though "Apple" and "Amazon" are company names for two tech giants, both are generic words (which cannot be universally trademarked) and neither of those two companies are in the plumbing business, so the likelihood for confusion is low. However, if I tried to use the same or similar-looking logos as Apple or Amazon, or if I switched from a plumbing business to a computer repair business, I would be much more likely to run afoul of copyright law, because now I'm entering into a business line Apple and Amazon do participate in and am using similar iconography, so the odds of a customer assuming I'm affiliated with their brand is much higher.

Complicating things further is that US trademark law affords wide latitude to particularly famous marks. The Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure has an entire section on Fame of the Prior Registered Mark (TMEP 1207.01(d)(ix)) which states, in part, "As the fame of a mark increases, the degree of similarity between the marks necessary to support a conclusion of likely confusion declines." Given how famous Mickey Mouse is and how integral he is to Disney's brand, Disney would have a strong case for trademark infringement for anyone who does decide they want to make their own variant of Steamboat Willie or other early Disney stories. Again, I'm not sure the particulars of how this intersects with laws regarding works in the public domain, but I'm guessing Disney's lawyers have already spent considerable time and effort figuring that out and preparing legal arguments for when it inevitably happens.

@Judgmenl why you have DeltaBladeX and Jen0125 blocked?

Zeus posted...

Which would be fucking insane, tbh. Something like that should never in the public domain.

Look at Zeus supporting shitty copyright laws.