Disney Copyrights

How do the Gor sims do it then? I keep hearing of sims where they play Disney-Gor.

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Aleco

P.S. S,cnr.

The use of any Disney copyrighted names, logos, pictures, songs, movie clips, etc...EVERYTHING Disney...is in violation of their copyright and they vigorously prosecute.

Perhaps because the sheer ludicracy (new word?) of such a thing boggles the mind..

You know, I keep looking at that (and it's companion a few rows down) and am simply STUNNED that it's evaded the All-Seeing Eye of the Mouse for so long. I'm not surprised the maker hasn't heeded the warnings in the discussion for the item, 'cause he probably has the "anonymous syndrome" where he thinks the Big D won't actually come after him.. but damn, I don't wanna be him when they do.

Then again, could be they're letting it stew for now to promote the movie and increase the amount of cash they'll be able to get from the dude once it's out of theaters....

Thanks to everyone who submitted a reply in some fashion. I have been working hard on a Fairy Tale sim- it seems that there are a lot out there and I question any success but anyways.. I was looking over the movies and compiled a list to the best of my knowledge and thought you guys might be interested in seeing.

BASED ON A FAIRY TALE/STORY
Snow White
Pinocchio
Dumbo
Bambi
The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice In Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmations
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
Robin Hood
Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver and Company (loosely)
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under (loosely)
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King (VERY loosely)
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Norte Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Atlantis




NOT BASED ON A FAIRY TALE
Fantasia
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Aristocrats
Fantasia 2000
Lilo and Stitch
Brother Bear
The Emperor's New Groove
Home on the Range

So yeah.. in conclusion, all the GOOD Disney movies were based, in some way, on fairy tales. This gives me some confidence- I should be able to use all of the characters from Alice In Wonderland, which makes me very happy.

So in short.. it's okay to use book characters, bad to use movie characters.... ?

No. Book characters are just as subject to copyright as anything else. The point is that folk tales/fairy tales are "public domain", with no attributable owner, or with the copyright expired.
(A side note on that: Peter Pan is not a folk tale, but a comparatively recent play by J. M. Barrie, and in fact has a very special status when it comes to copyright, with exceptions specifically for it written in British law).
Edited to add: Several other of the movies on your "fairy tale" list are also attributable to a single author, and as such not in public domain as folk tales, though some are old enough to have entered public domain by expiration of the copyright.

Fantasia ain't good? None of the other musical short films? I give ya a big raspberry!

I must take that statement back. Emperor's New Groove, The Aristocats are both great movies- and I have not seen Fantasia the original. So.. I do own them,so I better get watching!

So, this brings me to a new idea/discussion.. Rohald Dahl. Is it safe to use Willy Wonka, Charlie Buckett, Violet, etc etc.. at the Relay for Life on SL, there was a section with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory stuff. Is this story old enough to use?

Talk to JJ Drinkwater (head of the Caledon Library) and say I sent you - JJ knows where to get MASSIVE amounts of public domain text and scanned images - for instance, Peter Rabbit (Beatrix Potter).

If I recall correctly it may be the Gutenberg project - but JJ would know. This is right down their alley.

Also, 19th c and older real materials are beyond copyright! Though do be careful about images on the internet; modern photographs of old things are generally copyrighted.

* * * * *

I actually liked The Emperor's New Groove. Anyone remember that character Kronk? Brilliant character!

(danger, copyrighted image ahead, cover your public-domain eyes!)

Actually, no. Anything less than 50 years is highly unlikely to have expired under any current rules. It ranges somewhere along 50 years after the death of the author, or 70 years after creation, or something to that tune, depending on which laws you're under. In fact, Disney has been a strong lobby power for extending the expiration limit, continually pushing it to keep some of their oldest works protected in the US.
There are still such things as fair use, and the fact that some authors may just feel it heartwarming to see their creations used and thriving.

So if I understand that lawsuit cited earlier correctly, Disney exclusively owns all blue donkeys and all orange tigers. When are they going to sue Kellogg's for infringing their property with Tony the Tiger?

Heh! I had animation teachers who worked for Disney years ago, and they told such tales of misery that I never had any urge to work for Disney. I've worked in some restrictive corporate enviroments before, but the big D topped 'em all.

Hey, are you trying to say Lilo & Stitch wasn't good? I loved that movie. And Fantasia was a masterpiece. The Emporer's New Groove, on the other hand, well, you can't win 'em all.

Anyway, in regard to your question:


The question of whether they're "book characters" or "movie characters" or any other "______ characters" has nothing to do with it. It's a question of IP rights.

The reason you can use fairy tales like Snow White and Cinderella, legends like King Arthur, and myths like Hercules, is because no one owns them. They're folklore. Nobody knows who actually first wrote them, and whoever it was, they died centuries ago. These stories have been told, retold, reinvented, reworked, and borrowed from, countless times, to the point where their characters and messages are archetypal, part of our collective cultural consciousness.

The reason you can use stories and characters like Dracula and Frankenstein is because, even though we know who their authors were, they've been dead long enough for their copyrights to have expired. Generally, copyright will survive an author by 80 years. Mary Shelly (Frankenstein) has been dead for nearly double that.

The reason you can't use stuff that comes from movies is not because movies are somehow any different than books, inherently. It's just because the owners of the copyrights, trademarks, and other IP rights to them are still alive.

Disney is a corporation. It can't "die" unless it goes out of business and is legally dissolved, which isn't likely to happen any time soon. Its property will remain its property for as long as it chooses to retain ownership.

If you were to find an independent film whose creator has been dead for more than 80 years, and you're positive there are no survivors who might own the rights, then the work is an orphan, and you're free to use any or all of it for whatever you want. But for major motion pictures, forget it.

Their copyrights on individual works *can*, however, expire due to sheer age, which is what Disney is fighting to prolong.
They also still hold the ace that at least the mouse himself has status as a trademark, which will not expires as long as it is reasonably defended.

i seem to remember there was some small bit of modeling work done by the 'hitchhikers' movie production crew, wasn't there? i seem to remember seeing a picture of a marvin robot avi someplace, maybe nwn way back then. i seem to remember it was made by the movie's production crew for some previz and kicks (i don't think they did any serious movie promotion inworld though like 'legend/lword/csi'; was too pre-sl-hype for that ;0)

ahh here we go some links:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/04/hitchhikers_gui.html
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/04/avalon_hitchhik.html

Ah, maybe that was it!

I bet they sold the regions privately and just never rebaked the bake layer.

It might be funny, though, to do a 'revert' on any region someone buys - who knows what else lurks on the bake layer!

Imagine living on a giant Disney-logo-shaped island...

Want to have some real fun? *PARODY* is protected by the copyright laws. If you want to parody Disney ... knock yourself out.

Think "Wierd Al" ... he doesn't have to get usage rights in order to create a parody of other people's music.

Saturday Night Live doesn't have to get permission to use the CNN logo and liknesses of their news anchors, because it's parody.

It used to be 50 years as the copyright on the mouse is due to expire, Disney (successfuly so far) lobbied congress to extend this to 70 years.

<enter puns on mickey mouse copyright laws here...>

Matthew

The copyright of Peter Pan lies with Great Ormond Street Childrens' Hospital, in London.

J M Barrie left the copyright to Gt. Ormonds and when the 50 year period after his death was over and the copyright would have run out, a special Act of Parliament was passed to leave the copyright with the hospital in perpetuity.

I believe parody falls under fair use, wich is subject to interpretation by a court of law and not so cut and dry. Be very careful how you parody things with Disney! They may still go after you if money is involved. Two words come to mind - Wally Wood. He just narrowly missed a lawsuit back in 1967. A guy making bootleg black light posters of the Wally Wood image below was not so lucky.



http://www.illegal-art.org/print/popups/orgy.html

In case this post was not a joke, "Disney Gor" has nothing to do with Disney or any of its copyright protected property. It's a perjorative term used to describe Gorean sims that deviate from Gorean society as depicted in John Norman's novels and ranges from what one might call "carebear" sims to "f**k and kill" sims.

No, that would draw too many child avies.

As far as I understand it..

You can use the public domain book characters, but (and this is the rub) you can't use their APPEARANCES if those were original to Disney. In other words, you can't make Snow White look like the Snow White that's in the movie, because the appearance is Disney's copyright, even if the character isn't.

Not even I would wanna live in care-bear land.

Wow read this thread when it started and then just this afternoon got an email from SLX saying they were pulling a couple of my items, one was WTP based and the other Tigger. They stated unless I provided a statement from Disney saying it was ok to use this I could not sell as it was against copyright laws.

Sexy Partridge