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

Weird decision

[Joce640k]

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

Re:Weird decision

[SilentStaid]

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.

Re:Weird decision

[conspirator57]

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

Re:Weird decision

[anyGould]

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...

sanity ?

[Tom]

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?