it’s insane when people on reddit defend disney in that bullshit lawsuit about how they HAVE to sue a daycare for using its characters in a mural, they HAVE to in order to keep their other bullshit going. i’ve seen multiple posts! acting like it’s smart business!
So IANAL but my brother used to do IP law before it broke him. The way he explained it to me was that it’s not that it’s a business decision, it’s that they can lose the trademark if they don’t try to defend it. So if something comes to their attention, they aren’t really allowed to pick and choose who gets to infringe on their IP rights.
I’m sure there’s a better explanation out there but I’m a tax guy, but an IP guy.
That being said, the situation you described (I am unfamiliar with the case) sounds like such bullshit. The point of trademark is to avoid confusion. Unless that daycare was in Anaheim, Orlando, or Burbank I wouldn’t assume any connection to Disney (and if it was in those cities I’d assume the connection was that they’d hired a Disney artist to paint their wall). There’s gotta be a fair use defense here.
You wrote some fuckery to reword “…they HAVE to sue a daycare for using its characters in a mural, they HAVE to in order to keep their other bullshit going.” with more corporate sympathy.
Fuck Disney, fuck you, and fuck copyright law.
It should be rewritten, and culture should be allowed to function normally again.
C’mon we are better than this here. Firstly be friendlier. Secondly they just tried to explain why, given the current legal system, sometimes a company has to do stuff that at first glance seems like a bad business decision.
I agree that the system is flawed, and that IP laws need a big reformation, that’s the case pretty much worldwide I might add. But just describing the status quo is not “corporate sympathy” and attacking people for it is bad manners at least.
Edit: Also, just for clarification, this whole issue is not copyright but trademark right related, which can be even stranger than copyright laws.
in case you haven’t seen the acronym before (it took me a minute the first time I saw it too!), it means “I Am Not A Lawyer”. It’s a disclaimer that the advice given is NOT legal advice.
If your post was just a joke: a) I thought the same thing when I first saw that b) no kink shaming 😅
it’s that they can lose the trademark if they don’t try to defend it
So the copyright and trademark system needs to change then.
Also, those laws were essentially ghostwritten by Disney and the like, so I very much doubt that wasn’t an intentional thing so they can go “look, we have to sue you, our hands are tied!”
To clarify, you don’t need to defend copyright to maintain it, only trademarks. They’re very different things. Copyright is meant to protect you from people just reprinting your stuff (and privacy). Trademarks are meant to protect the distinguishing features your company uses to separate it from other companies.
The standard for losing a trademark essentially boils down to “no reasonable person would expect the public to know it’s a trademark, so any infringement can be assumed to be accidental”. So things like dry ice, heroin, escalator, gasoline, trampoline, flip phone, and teleprompter. Common words where the fact that they were once trademarks is obscure trivia. The more commonly cited examples of genericized trademarks like Kleenex or Band-Aid are not actually genericized, that’s a myth, they’re in no danger of being genericized because people know they’re trademarks.
A simple crease and desist letter surely suffice for this, right? No need to waste resource suing a daycare for copyright infringement?
they can lose the trademark if they don’t try to defend it
This is true, but that’s if another company is using a similar logo as their own. Like, if a pet store used the Mickey Mouse logo, of course they’re going to be sued.
If a daycare uses Mickey Mouse to decorate their classroom, Disney doesn’t have to sue because the trademark isn’t be used separate from Disney. The Daycare, and kids, are using it because it’s Disney, so there is no confusion about trademark ownership.
At the very least, Disney could simply write them a letter allowing them to use depictions of Disney characters inside the school so long as it’s not for advertising or commercial purposes and the art is done by a student or teacher.
No really such thing as fair use in trademark but it’s definitely possible to not be an asshole about it. You can definitely allow use, the question is whether you assert control over use of the mark or not.
You wouldn’t want to allow extreme cases (a daycare Disney-theming itself completely associating itself, unilaterally, with all your IP and by extension looking like a Disney-licensed and associated daycare) but “as minor part of a larger artwork, or a single mural of a single character not publicly visible” avoids damage to the mark’s image.
From the other POV, as a daycare, you should only ever do murals of Mickey if he’s holding a giant cookie.
Not copyright, trademark. At least, that’s the rules those comments assume Disney is following. It’s pretty dumb, I can’t think of any world those characters get genericised, but eh.
Disney is largely protecting its characters with trademark law now, yes. That’s why there’s no particular effort to extend copyright any further than they have.
Now, as long as there are companies in a capitalist system, or even in something closer to market socialism, trademark makes a certain amount of sense. You have certain branding that’s associated with your company (even if it’s a worker-owned co-op), and you don’t want your customers confused over its use by another company. We can certainly think of ways the current system can be approved–wider protection for satire, or easier ways to shut down bullshit lawsuits without spending a lot of money–but the idea makes sense in this context.
Now, if we’re aiming for a more commune-based system beyond market socialism, then no, we don’t need trademark at all.
There’s a subset of the population that is absolutely fine with businesses fucking over regular people in the name of profit in no-harm crimes like you mention. Heck, they even want certain political figures to screw over regular people because they’re great businessmen.
Of course they’d probably change their tune if they’re the ones getting screwed over.
Don’t put this on Lemmy, you’re compromising all the instances who download it! These guys can’t afford the legal defense.
IANAL, but I think in this context this would count as political commentary/expression and therefore fair use.
Yeah and they’re being extra weak as this is the steamboat willy Micky which falls into public domain Jan 1st 2024 which is only a couple of months away.
Nooooo, the Internet has told me several times over the past 4 years that Disney has a secret plan to push a hidden bill to extend copyright another 100 years. This is the worst thing that could happen, and therefore it definitely will.
I expect a Disney short featuring Steamboat Willie Mickey to be released on December 31st, 2023.
I would also buy this on a shirt. Where can I buy this? I want to buy this. This shirt I want to buy.
If you didn’t know, I believe this image was made in response to specific bots that would throw up a link to an automated listing, with stolen art copy pasted on a t-shirt jpeg, whenever people on twitter said “I want this on a shirt”.
Small artists had trouble defending their art from being stolen by these bots, and this image (and subsequent comments like “I want to buy this shirt”) was a trap to get these bots in trouble with disney.
If you knew all this and I’m just rambling, ignore me
Wow! Does anyone know where i can get this? A link to a site that steals my credit card info perhaps?
Regardless of what it says on the image this is 100% a parody.
I think maybe you’re out of the loop here. This is part of a trend to screw over bots that automatically steal art and sell it on random sites. That’s why others are commenting stuff like “I’d buy this on a t-shirt!”.
The tactic has already been proven to work several times, when people post stuff like this, and then report the shops that steal it to Disney’s legal team. It’s a clever way to leverage Disney’s lawyers to protect regular artists who couldn’t afford to sue all these random websites.
