Last November, Microsoft and Novell jumped into a shot-gun marriage (over
SUSE Linux) with a 5-year patent agreement that is suspicious, to say the
least. Lawyers continue to cripple this industry, as they have others.
http://publicaddress.net/default,3887.sm#post3887
Land-grab in the Magic Kingdom | Jan 30, 2007 09:10
If you follow these issues, you will doubtless be familiar with the US Sonny
Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which saw the Walt Disney Company
successfully lobby for a law that prevented various of its works coming out
of copyright. You probably are not aware that earlier this month Disney
applied to the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand for sweeping
trade mark protection around works that Disney did not create. <<<<<<<<<<<<<
The upshot of the Copyright Term Extension Act - dubbed by various wags the
Mickey Mouse Protection Act - was that Mickey Mouse, whose copyright
protection had been due to expire in 2003 (the 75th anniversary of Steamboat
Willie), was placed back under protection until at least 2019, along with
Donald Duck, Pluto and the rest of the gang. In the process, tens of
thousands of works were prevented from entering the public domain.
You might argue - as Disney did - that people are living longer these days,
and Disney deserved longer protection for its own creations. But what about
other people's creations?
Disney's application to IPONZ for a trade mark on Alice in Wonderland. The
specification of goods and services for which trade mark protection is
sought is very lengthy: from furniture to food, clothing to CDs.
You may be astonished at the breadth of the application being lodged by a
company that has done no more, in this case, than produce adaptations of
classic works of children's literature. Ditto for Snow White, Peter Pan,
Pinocchio and a list of characters from those works.
This is not trivial. It would be understandable for Disney to try and
protect its interpretations of existing characters, but its application for
so-called "word marks" implies something much more than that: it implies
exclusive rights to use all those characters. There have been at least 14
English-language films based on Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel The Adventures of
Pinocchio (which itself drew on classical sources), and many more in other
languages. If Disney was to obtain such trade marks (which cover "motion
picture films"), would it then become impossible to make - or at least
market - another one without Disney's permission? Would it be a copyright
lockout via the back door?
Fortunately, the claims are still under examination and it appears that
IPONZ won't simply wave the rubber stamp. Disney is being asked to prove its
original rights in the characters and their names. One would hope that
Disney is not allowed to annex stories that are out of copyright (in some
cases, that's precisely why Disney was able to make movies of them) merely
because it adapted them. That would be creepy.
