Betty Boop and Indefinite Copyright

An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the Fleischer estate has lost a court battle for the rights to Betty Boop, a character created by Grim Natwick at Max Fleischer's studio in 1930. The 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals (based in San Francisco) ruled against the Fleischers, saying in their decision, 'If we ruled that AVELA's depictions of Betty Boop infringed Fleischer's trademarks, the Betty Boop character would essentially never enter the public domain.'"

Comments

Re:Weird decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Some old Betty Boop posters ran out of copyright.
Those images were reproduced.

The two questions being decided were:
Q1. Who has the copyright
Q2. Who owns the trademark

A1a. Copyright no longer applies to the images being sued over.
A1b. The Plaintiff didn't prove they owned the copyright to Betty Boop.
A2. The Plaintiff didn't prove they owned the trademark to the Betty Boop character.

A lack of evidence is what got them kicked out of court

Clarifying comment

[richie2000]

I'm re-posting one of the comments from TFA here, as it seems to clear up some of the confusion.

David Gerstein says:
02/27/11 9:01pm

Rough analysis (could be wrong):

The Betty Boop character is a Fleischer trademark.

But—Betty Boop 1930s movie posters were not copyrighted (or not renewed?) as standalone items, so are public domain.
Fleischer tried to use its active trademark on the character to stop a third party’s use of the ancient PD art. Judge said this was a no-go.

What I take from the judge’s ruling is that the trademark only applies to new, modern uses of the character. It can’t be used to stop people from redistributing old PD Betty images/items. Fleischer tried to say trademark trumped copyright; the judge is saying that it doesn’t.

This is actually pretty major. In recent years, Warner has used the active trademarks on Looney Tunes characters to quash third parties’ reissues of PD 1930s/40s Looney Tunes content (of which there is a lot). If the Betty decision is not reversed on appeal, then Warner is stripped of its strongest weapon against the public domain.
It can use the trademark against those who would create new Bugs Bunny items, but not against those who would exploit old PD material that Warner failed to protect.

The issue of whether Paramount legitimately sold the active Betty trademark to Harvey appears to be entirely separate, though very interesting.

Re:sanity ?

[Sonny Yatsen]

Gah, it's not a matter of copyright law here. Fleischer sold the rights to the Betty Boop to another studio, who in turn sold it to Paramount, who in turn sold it to Harvey. The whole thing comes down to whether the Fleischer estate can sue someone for the rights they gave up half a century ago. The Reuters article linked to by the blog actually states this, while the blog turns it into some sort of copyright spin, which doesn't matter so much as Fleischer's estate had no ownership interest in the property itself.

Re:Betty Boop Copyright Details

[Artifakt]

The dates, i.e. 1924, 1930, and similar, are an important part of this problem. The other date that makes them important is 1929. When the great depression hit, a lot of judges divided up assets of failing companies among creditors and included trademarks and copyrights in those assets. You have a huge spike in bankruptcy cases, where they were overwhelming the courts, and where the IP was generally thought to be trivial, near worthless, and the courts were mostly focused on the physivcal property such as buildings, presses and even paper stock, treating the IP as an afterthought. Tremendous copyright extensions mean all those cases are part of sorting through who owns what today.
      Take the Lovecraft estate. H P Lovecraft was generally out of the habit of selling all rights to a story to a magazine by 1926. He wrote in the amateur author's magazines about the advantages of selling just first rights in case there was an actual chance at further publication, and seems to have been very serious about it. His single, most famous work, The Call of Cthulhu, was published in 1926, presumably as a first rights sale if he kept to what he announced he would do. But, if you look at the Lovecraft copyright trail, there are a huge number of his most major works where, in the early 30's, as HPL lay dying of bright's disease, some small press or other claimed his works, gave them away as part of a bankruptcy case, and often awarded them to some other company that seems to have existed only for a few days as one court settlement after another cascaded through the overburdened system.
        The system didn't promoter progress in the sciences and useful arts, it ripped off a great artist as he lay dieing in agony. The current versions of the laws preserve the right of litigants to dredge up some of the most spurious and fraudulent precedents ever entered into American law..All the court cases subsequent to that are tainted (fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine). I doubt either Brown University or the Estate of August Derleth could be said to have less than the highest respect for Lovecraft himself, but their court cases were based on a legal tangle that made them very hard to settle fairly and serve as a model of nobody being really satisfied once finally over. How many other authors are less known today, not for any flaw on their part but because the depression court battles wiped out any chance of their being published again?