A Real Mickey Mouse Enterprise

Sonny Bono (a Republican, for the record) was the one who originally wrote legislation extending copyright from 56 years to the now virtually eternal copyright that exists.

Copyright was created in the Constitution to spur development of ideas and inventions for the public domain. To urge people to be creative, copyrights and patents gave them for a limited period of time exclusive right to use their innovation, after that the public at large could use it freely.

Copyright protects the specific expression of an idea for a limited period of time.

Trademark a.k.a. service mark protects a specific combination of image and words used in commerce and may be extended indefinitely

Trademark originally meant a name or phrase in a specific visual presentation used by a business to identify its brand, but now has been expanded to include specific product designs (which is why the 12-inch tall G.I. Joes have a backwards thumb to thwart pirating).

Trademarks never age out and enter the public domain but can be abandoned.

Mickey Mouse as a character name and design is trademarked in several different iterations, from the classic original mouse to the latest reboot. You can’t use the character’s name without Disney’s permi$$ion.

However, several of the earliest works with Mickey have entered public domain, notably the first couple if years of the daily Mickey Mouse comic strip.

Those strips can be reprinted without Disney’s permission because they’re in the public domain; however, the last time an indie publisher reprinted them, it was in a plain text only cover edition called Classic Mouse Comic Strips because Disney would not approve their using the trademark Mickey Mouse.

Mickey’s name + look as a trademark can be used to block new stories / art using that trademark.

This is what ERB Inc did with Tarzan and 6-limbed green Martians:  
They trademarked the names andimages so anyone wanting to use them needs to license them from the company even though the novels are entering the public domain. There has been an unlicensed version of A Princess Of Mars made without 6-limbed Martians.

Now, you’re theoretically allowed “one time parody fair use” of copyrighted / trademarked material. The infamous Air Pirates Funnies would have been safe if they did only one issue, but the second brought the House of Mouse down on them like a ton of bricks. 

And parodies don’t need to be funny in order to be parodies: 
The adult video industry regularly makes films with titles like The Adult Captain America or The X-Rated Star Wars in order to skate around copyright and trademarks.*

Nobody knows where the line between parodying vs parroting lies because neither side wants to find out!  The anxiety for copyright holders is that a court ruling might give the parodists far greater freedom to use copyrighted / trademarked material; conversely the parodists don’t want to prod the lion (or in this case, the Mouse) in the cage too often for fear of the courts siding with them.

To quote Yul Brynner in The King And I:  “Is a puzzlement!”

Copyright vs trademark is tricky. A few years ago a collectibles company issued a lunch box with a Wizard Of Oz poster on it. MGM sued and lost; the poster had never been copyrighted and had long since lapsed into the public domain.

The company then made individual lunchboxes using the heads of characters taken from the poster, got sued by MGM again, and lost that time because while the poster as a whole was in the public domain, the individual character designs were still trademarked!

For the record, I’m in favor of cranking copyright back to 56 years; as we can see with endless rehashes in popular media, it stifles originality.

© Buzz Dixon

* No, I’m not going to provide links; look ‘em up yourselves. I don’t judge you for being perverts, but I do for being lazy ones.