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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.'"
Do you think it's possible to mod a Judge insightful?
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
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?
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
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
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?
They call me Toot now. Sometimes I cut myself to relieve the pain...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
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.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
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?