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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.'"
Maybe they have less money/lobbyists than Disney or something...
No sig today...
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?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Once again, a story about a lawsuit posted to /. with a particular spin but very light on facts. According to one of the linked articles:
[Judge] Wallace also said the defendant AVELA Inc, which licensed Betty Boop dolls, T-shirts and handbags under a copyright based on vintage posters, did not infringe any trademark, having not held out its products as "official" or misled customers.
So according to one article Avela licensed the images, according to another they were public domain. According to one, the images are OK because they're not claimed to be "official," according to the other the images are OK because Betty Boop is public domain. What's the real story? Is it about public domain? Is it about the relationship between copyright and trademark? I have no idea. Neither the reporters or the submitter bothered to explain, or apparently, even to find out.
Breakfast served all day!
Since Betty Boop was made in 1930 and Mickey Mouse was made in 1928 then this means that Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain! ...right?
Hey what's with all the laughing?
I'm re-posting one of the comments from TFA here, as it seems to clear up some of the confusion.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Because that does not make lazy idiots that want to milk their inheritance for money rich.
We have to think of the lazy grand children and great grand children!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Easy. Two words: Property Tax.
First 14 years: 0 tax
Next 14 years: 5% of assessed value, minimum $25,000 per year per copyright
Next 14 years: 5%, $50,000 min
Next 14 years: 5%, $100,000 min
and so on. Make people and companies VERY careful about which works they wish to maintain copyright on.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
There's another important case currently at the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, Warner Bros. Entertainment, et al. v. X One X Productions, et al., to which AVELA is also a defendant.
The case involves the use of images of Dorothy and friends from the Wizard of Oz. The characters were published, shortly before the movie was released, on promotional movie posters for which copyright was not sought (in those days, you had to register copyrights, unlike today, where the Berne Convention specifies automatic copyright upon publication). However, the district court ruled that the defendants, in selling various products featuring images of the Wizard of Oz characters (though not taken specifically from the movie, which is still under copyright) infringed upon the plaintiff's copyright in the movie because it used the images of the characters.
Of course, what the Ninth Circuit says in the case in TFA is apposite to the case in the Eighth Circuit. If one can infringe the copyright of a work by merely using images of characters depicted therein, then the copyright on a character can be maintained indefinitely by simply using the character in a new work from time to time. Even if the earliest works were in the public domain, the characters in those works would still be protected by the copyrights of the newer works, and this could be extended into perpetuity at the whim of the copyright holder. That clearly violates the "limited times" part of the Copyright Clause of the Constitution (although the Ninth Circuit addressed this in terms of the 1909 Copyright Act, which was the controlling law when the Wizard of Oz movie's copyright came into force, and which indicates that copyrights can't be extended in this fashion).
Grim Natwick, the animation artist who created the character of Betty Boop told a story to Howard Beckerman, an animation historian, and my instructor when I attended School of Visual Arts in NYC.
Apparently, Grim was up for a scholarship to the Art Institute of Vienna, and he was competing against another young artist of the time, a young man named Adolf Hitler. Grim got the scholarship, beating out Adolf.
For decades, Grim blamed himself for World War II. If he'd let Adolf win the scholarship, that guy might have just gone on to become some nameless painter doing still-lifes, instead of becoming the most infamous name in all of history.
I'm not sure how true this all is, but it sounds plausible. Either way, it's a good story related to Betty Boop.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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?
Who is John Cabal?
Look for my fine line of car stickers of Betty pissing on things you don't like(tm) at fine convenience stores everywhere!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Gregory S. Brown determined that the film was likely in the public domain in the United States already due to errors in the original copyright formulation.
But who is willing to risk millions of USD testing Brown's argument in a court of law? As long as the answer is nobody, the copyright is still de facto valid.