[w1ntermute]

> Disney wants to keep control of Mickey Mouse cartoons, and it doesn't feel unreasonable at all that they should.

It feels completely unreasonable to me. There's no reason why Disney should be given an exception when others aren't. It's idiotic to suggest that they should get special treatment just because their IP is commercially valuable.

[officemonkey]

Mickey Mouse is protected by trademark.

The Steamboat Willie article is specious. Thanks to a failure to register copyrights (back when those things mattered) the Fleischer studio "Superman" cartoons are in the public domain. The world did not end. People may use and sell these cartoons, but they still have to be careful not to run aground against the Superman trademark.

The same thing would happen to Steamboat Willie.

[crpatino]

I don't think "Disney" is capable of wanting anything, since old Walt's been dead for decades now. That's what happens when you grant personhood status to abstract entities.

[Contero]

Why is it idiotic?

I see more value in having Disney pay an appropriately large amount of money to keep their IP than I see in making sure that their specific content gets into the public domain.

Who cares about steamboat willy if Disney is going to fight tooth and nail over it? It's everything else that will expire into the public domain that I care about.

[notahacker]

Disney are only willing to pay an appropriately large amount of money to keep their IP if they believe the public are actually willing to pay them significantly more because they have that IP.

It's not such a big deal applied to films; the amount in the government coffers is swollen by less than the extra Disney fans have voluntarily spent on old films, but no great loss is suffered by those who aren't willing or able to pay Disney's asking price. But establishing a principle that corporations should be able to retrospectively extend the fixed-term of their IP for cash would be particularly dangerous when it comes to things like patents...

[coderdude]

I disagree. Disney is the perfect example of when copyright should be extended. Disney (the man) is dead but he didn't die owning a portfolio of cartoon IP. Disney (the corporation) owned that and still has a global business that lives and dies by the fact that it can maintain its brand. I don't see any benefit to mankind if people were suddenly free to print Mickey Mouse onto t-shirts and sell them.

[pyre]

  | I don't see any benefit to mankind if people were
  | suddenly free to print Mickey Mouse onto t-shirts
  | and sell them.

Mickey Mouse is a trademark of the Disney Corporation. Someone selling Mickey Mouse t-shirts would quickly run afoul of Disney's trademark lawyers. If Steamboat Willie fell into the public domain it would just mean that I could legally sell copies of it on DVD, or I could dub my voice over the video and post it to YouTube. Neither of these would materially harm Disney. Printing frames captured from Steamboat Willie on t-shirts would fall into an area where Disney could reasonably take someone to court for violating their trademark. Printing a generic image of Mickey Mouse on a t-shirt would be blatant violation of trademark, and practically an open-and-shut case.

I can't tell if you're just trolling or uninformed, but there are always a handful of posts in these discussions that don't understand the differences between patent, copyright and trademark.

[coderdude]

I just didn't know that Mickey Mouse was also trademarked. I do understand the differences between the three, however.

[danielweber]

I had a really long convoluted discussion with an IP lawyer, and he claimed that only specific instances of Mickey Mouse's likeness were protected by trademark.

I haven't really absorbed his argument, but he seemed pretty sure about it, and that we needed something else to (legitimately, in both our opinions) protect Disney's ability to control their brand even if copyright expired. He recommended giving Disney something very much like "right of publicity" for Mickey Mouse so they can still control the character, while allowing lots of old stuff to still enter the public domain.

[pyre]

To me, this sort of stuff seems like the IP law equivalent of bailing out banks (or GM) because they are "too big to fail."

Even if specific instances of Mickey Mouse's likeness are trademarked, I have a hard time believing that someone could be selling "Mickey Mouse" t-shirts on the street and not be in a risky legal grey zone.

[I'll also note that as an IP lawyer he probably has a rather conservative view of this. Thinking from Disney's perspective they don't want any trademark lawsuit to be in a legal grey zone. They want them all to be slam-dunks so that they can get their way.]

[jkn]

You're confusing copyright and trademark. If copyright was allowed to expire, people could freely share the earliest Disney movies, but they still couldn't infringe the Mickey Mouse trademark by printing t-shirts since the trademark doesn't expire.

[coderdude]

Yeah, you're right. I should have done a little reading first.

From Wikipedia: "It is sometimes erroneously stated that the Mickey Mouse character is only copyrighted."[1]

I could have avoided this one. :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse#Legal_issues