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Betty Boop and Indefinite Copyright

Posted by Roblimo on from the boop-boop-a-doop-forever dept.

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.'"

8 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Weird decision by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Maybe they have less money/lobbyists than Disney or something...

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    No sig today...
    1. Re:Weird decision by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Thank God!

    2. Re:Weird decision by SilentStaid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You may not have seen any Mickey Mouse cartoons, but I'm sure you've heard of some little things called:

      Kingdom Hearts
      House of Mouse
      Disney on Ice
      Epic Mickey

      Don't get me wrong, I'm by no means a Disney fanboy (just have young nieces) and what I think they do with it is ridiculous, but to say that they're not still actively producing new works with Mickey himself is uninformed at best.

      Now if we could just get them to stop being so douchey about things that they shouldn't be, such as sending a cease and desist to a local Chuck-E-Cheese here for having the employees wear mouse ears.

    3. Re:Weird decision by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Nice to see the Senate acting nonpartisan about something. A shame its stealing rights from citizens.

    4. Re:Weird decision by conspirator57 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      al franken has a fiduciary interest in long or infinite copyright given his numerous publications and other copyright protected merchandise.

      --
      "If still these truths be held to be
      Self evident."
      -Edna St. Vincent Millay
    5. Re:Weird decision by anyGould · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The other side of this, of course, is that this is about, essentially, stealing copyrighted material and selling counterfeit goods. This goes to tens of billions of dollars in theft. Some of the supporters of this were after the American Federation of TV and Radio Artists, the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild I happen to belong to all three of those unions.

      So yeah, there's some vested interest going on there.

      On the plus side, not only is he very honest about his vested interest (I snipped the quote to just the relevant part - he's a member of the three unions), but at least they're *his* interests, and not interests paid for by outsiders.

      I still think they should have gone with the NASCAR idea, where instead of the byline being (Joe Politician, D-Arizona) it was (Joe Politician, Exxon, IBM, Mattel). These days knowing who their major donors are is more informative than what party they belong to...

  2. sanity ? by Tom · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sanity in copyright law? Gosh, you look different. Haven't seen you for years. How's life? Must be horrible, you look like an abuse victim. You sure you're not taking drugs?

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    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
  3. Re:Yet again, no information by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Yeah, there's some ambiguity there. Let me enlighten you.
    1) Big corporations are only interested in money. B.C.s don't care about rights or Public Domain or best interests. Money. That's all.
    2) Although B.C.s can get money by producing items that are in the Public Domain, they can foresee getting much more money if they keep everyone else from producing those items, too.
    3) Also, although the B.C.s can copyright the specific items they make based on P.D. characters and works, they would rather not hassle with penny-ante crap like that. Why by a chicken leg when you can get the whole chicken.
    4) So, here's what happened in this case.
            a) AVELA had a copyright based on a poster. Perfectly legal. Betty Boop is NOT in P.D. but they hold the copyright on the posters so there.
            b) The Fleischer Estate tried to get AVELA to pay them for the use of BB because, yes, they really do hold the copyright, just not on these specific posters
            c) AVELA was correct in their use of copyright because they never promoted their works as official. That is, AVELA never said their BB was THE BB, just A BB (based on a poster).
            d) The judge is still a corporate shill. He's just shilling for AVELA and not the Fleischer Estate.

    This was simply a battle between two copyright holders over who gets the money. There was never any danger of Betty Boop going to the public domain. If there was this would have been handled out of court and you wouldn't be reading the post.

    You may now return to surfing porn.