Has Disney sent a cease and desist letter about using public domain Mickey?
They semi-recently made an entire show using the old character styles presumably to muddy the legal waters and allow them to do exactly that…so I would assume so.
Just once I would love for a judge to just go "You know what? It’s obvious what your company is doing here, so rather than attempt to receive this information in good faith, since it’s not being OFFERED in good faith, we can go ahead and say you lose, and now owe punitive damages to every artist you’ve sued over the years over a couple circles. "
But no, they pretend that corporations are people.
I’ll believe they’re people when I finally see one executed, or taxed, or imprisoned, or face any of the consequences normal people do. You can’t argue the idea of a comoany has personhood and then walk that back any time it comes to punishment.
Fuck disney
Surely, any company that has made a financial decision to not fix something because fixing it is more expensive than paying compensation to the relatives of people they kill should be guilty of murder.
If they kill more than five or ten people it would be mass murder and probably subject to the death penalty.
Boeing would be getting worried right now if this was how it worked.
They also have been using the steamboat Willie clip as part of their intro, presumably for the same reason.
Trademark doesn’t have an expiration if they’re still using it, so they would argue that you’re violating their trademark instead of their copyright.
Leaving us hanging…
Or authors could preëmptively declare their works to be in the public domain upon their death.
I wish Creative Commons had a license like that. Something like
CC PDD
(Public-Domain-on-Death) which would activate upon the creator’s death, allowing them and publishers to freely monetize their work while they’re alive, but which would release the work into the public domain immediately after.It might even incentivize music and book publishers to get their artists health insurance. 😃