---disclaimer - I cite "Fair Use and Parody" for limited use of images - fonts can NOT be copyright or trademark protected - this is used to express myself not to make $ or steal any $ by decieving anyone I'm making a Disney product or affiliated with them --
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So, folks, as we should all know by now Steamboat Willie is in the Public Domain. Already the Deconstruction has started with a few horror and a retro toon gangster game and movies made in the spirit of "Blood and Honey".
Deconstruction is a necessary evil sometimes. Comic books had things like Batman: The Dark Knight returns and Marshall Law when the code weakened further and the direct market expanded to later become the "Comic Boom". The result was good that while the bubble crashed it established comics as a medium for everyone including adult (non x rated, but that also) serious storytelling. It had to break the mold the horrid Comics Code had forced it in for decades.
With Disney it's more a necessary social justice revenge.
I hate to use that term - "Social Justice" but that is what it is and what is needed.
No - I won't have Rexx Rhyder encounter an evil studio that grinds children into black magic ink to make hideous toon characters. I won't have Shah-Azir face an ancient evil that looks like Steamboat Willie. Likewise my friends in my circle are far more busy with our own projects while trying to survive in this despairing, doomed society to waste our talents on a public domain character.
Not when we've gotten used to a public domain that is "Penny Dreadful" era ... I'll get to that later...
-----First, I LOVE Disney, up to the mid 2000s----
When I was a child my Father (who passed recently) took me to Disneyland in California. I think I was one of the last people to ride the "Mighty Microscope" as it was a few years before they tore it up to make "Star Tours" then "Captain EO". I also got that incredible jungle ride with the fearsome animals, hippos that had to be shot and savage filed teeth cannibal Africans peering out from the jungle. I loved the Penny Arcade and played tons of pre-electronics videogames, then their "Starcade" with newer ones... I dined in the Enchanted Tiki Room the "Tiki Bar" was dying but to me it was new and fantastic and I liked that adult men would get to paw and grope and stare at cute girls serving them very sweet alcohol drinks while wearing grass skirts...
So long ago and I can almost retrace my steps. I loved all the Disney movies I saw on tv, including tons of forgotten ones and ones its now "Fashionably Radical" to hate.
I could type a long essay on that - but let's get to the point...
Disney is DEAD, not "Frozen" - and that's about when his ideas ran out...
I'm not saying it'd be different that much on what I'm going to say if he was in a freezer tube and they cure lung cancer and revive him. Well the current staff would be in dry heaving panic and he'd make beyond excellent movies, crowdfunded if need be, to recapture the magic. But he'd be throwing them into some fantasy but real dungeon over their loss of copyright, not another extension... He was a creative and business genius - he also hired Von Braun to create what would have been "Space: 1959" with trips to the Moon and back. Said man made V2 rockets for the Germans and used slave labor, regularly shooting the slower workers "Perhaps I can find ways to motivate them..." brought here under Project Paperclip and a fan of his old boss...
I loved Disney's works but learned long ago any excellent writer, artist or other great achiever has a dark side and he was master of both creativity, animation and business...
I'm not going to join the deconstruction bandwagon. Oh, a buddy might include a swearing steamboat captain mouse as a buddy to his Goblin character if he revives his webcomic from the 90s and 00s, but I'm working on finishing a lot of works that I've had on the burner too long and making more. I don't want to invest in old cartoons I still might get issues over and have that define me.
I mean if I could do it and it'd take a year to get shut down (vs a DAY) I might somehow get the $ to buy up a "Liminal Space Nightmare Fuel" shopping mall and make a daycare center + restaurant + arcade and make some new fiberglass "Steamboat Willie" - call it Steamboat Willie's Fun Center... So kids could run all over a huge empty mall but have guards there to keep them inside and pervos out and then we'd sell toys, food, etc. These empty malls could really be used to help rebuild society - but that's another blog post somewhere.
Don't worry, Disney, I won't DO that. They already have "Dismal Land" as a parody, so it'd be redundant also.
BTW - Mickey with gloves + red shorts IS public domain now also - LINK
All joking aside I'm sure Disney will do fine despite years of flops forcing "Identity Politics" instead of not trying to fix what wasn't broken. And they'll make sure they dominate the G-rated/family friendly use of their characters. If a snuff sadist in a Red Room wears a Mickey Mouse Mask he is worried about the Fed Fuzz tracking him down not Disney suing him (in jail on Death Row later...) for abusing their copyright. Much less some deconstructionist movies made or at last "Air Pirates Funnies" getting published again? IMO due to "Streisand Effect" I doubt they'll try to stop it this time, at worst demanding a Disclaimer on the cover.
----OK, my issue with Disney and the Damage it has Done----
The thing I hate about Disney is the damage to popular culture by taking from then coveting the Public Domain and the abuse of our wisdom tales aka "Fairy Tales". The latter is that the Disney model of making them have happy endings and being G-rated is that we needed the dark and "Grimm" ones. Fairy tales are meant to ram in critical wisdom to kids and keep with them as adults the most basic of common sense that they'll ignore if its just another lesson or tutelage thing. The Red Riding hood for example is to get kids to internalize how a Bandit might pretend to be friendly to them to get them talking to get an idea who lives where and what kind of target they might be.
Nowadays, thanks to Disney, you might insult an adult fool as "Do you still believe in fairy tales?" whereas in the past it was "Didn't ya listen when they told fairy tales!?" I think there'd be far less fodder for Dr Phil if the "Grimm" scared kids to bed and Classical education was beat in during the day. Just "One Man's Opinion"...
However for the damage on Folk Wisdom the larger damage is to culture and creativity by locking in "Their" rights - even again to things sourced from the Public Domain.
Yes, they have a right to Copyright and Trademark for their own original creations and their expansions on public domain. But they extended copyright multiple times.
Our copyright system is a tangled mess of edits, exceptions and unfairness and it is due to Disney and his company. Yes it is on his and his company's shoulders. Without him we'd have had at worst a weakened version of the 1976 extension and probably better clarity. The 1998 act was unforgivable.
We need a public domain that will have things we liked as children enter into it in our lifetimes. Those of us who become artists and storytellers need to be able to imitate - the greatest form of flattery - to help make our own works.
Look at the wasteland of film and tv we have now - almost every single product is a re-make, sometimes a re-re-remake of an existing work of decades past. God help anyone trying to sneak in anything new. God help anyone with NEW ideas such as living writers, artists...
This is because Disney extended copyright well past an expected lifetime. There is no need to risk on new products when you can just buy into and re-make older ones. The government protects big companies and helps them beat out fair competition. Independent acts find themselves forced to margins and blocked from any retail chain even with an internet where there should be few if any barriers.
So what - make your own work, at least it'll live on after you die because they rip off your relatives after you die and make it... sarcasm...
There's also trouble with existing works and how you express things especially with stories set in the here and now or recent past and future.
The third iteration of this is that Disney was so Covetous of its properties it made the "Fair use and copyright" options dangerous to use even when clearly fair.
Even with strong copyright laws there is a need for "Fair use and Parody" in which as long as its not real plagiarism or outright trademark/copyright theft. Mad Magazine fought for years - and won - to allow this. They often published parodies of movies the second they came out - say "SuperDuperMan" - and it only helped the main properties as proved they were popular enough to be worth it. They won, in court, the right to do so.
Disney has reversed much of it. Say the Underground Comic Air Pirates Funnies which they should have just ignored even when they were stupid. Or the day care with Disney characters painted on the wall.
Again it's not that I want to use Disney characters - it's that I want to make a reference to ANY characters at all. I don't care about not using Mickey Mouse as a main character - I care about having a story set in the 1980s and not being able to have characters talk about or refer to Mickey Mouse or if I put stock photos (even AI) have to scrub through them lest something that's copyrighted by someone somewhere poke through and some slithering snake comes out of the gutter to SUE me. Not because a picture of a character in Times Square or Miami or LosAngeles city has a 10x10 pixel image of their logo and it damages them but because they want MONEY and so can use the threat of a lawsuit to extort it. There are even squatters, trolls and fraudsters who abuse the trademark/patent system to threaten to sue for extortion and when its found out they have no reasonable claim nothing happens to them.
We can thank DISNEY for that.
There's also creative abuse where "Estates" and again sometimes fraudsters attempt to abuse trademark to extend a literary copyright. You'd think with two acts they rammed through they'd have thought of that... Perhaps because they have big lawyers so can beat these down but this helps hinder and ruin anyone who might be competition someday? Just "One Man's Opinion"...
This allows the threat of a lawsuit which will create a loss even in a win to allow all sorts of abuse.
For instance:
The "Burroughs" Estate harassing anyone who makes a Jungle Hero even though Tarzan is clearly in the Public Domain. Most notable is Taito's "Jungle King" which was forced to reskin into "Jungle Hunt" by threats from the Burroughs people.
JibJab - a popular political act having to pay huge amounts of money for the use of the Gutherie "This land" song which ended up costing millions but it turned out to be a copyright troll who vanished. And it didn't matter that Woodie Gutherie is on recording many times saying he was OK with others using his songs.
The "Happy Birthday" racket - any public performance got a lawsuit or threat of it. It's why Chuck E Cheese had to make up an alternative. Recently it was proven that said song was at least public domain in the 90s but likely was NEVER copyright or at least was published officially in the 1890s. Again the racket dissapeared with the $ despite a legion of lawsuits ready that should have gotten a billion $ back easily...
The Conan Doyle "Estate" over Sherlock Holmes. These people crippled the use of Sherlock Holmes despite him being well into the Public Domain. It's one of the main reason League of Extraordinary Gentleman the movie SUCKED so bad - they changed things just enough to defy the threat of a lawsuit for the comics but in a movie form it would have cost as much to make - or Sean Connery's wages - to license... At least recently a Judge rammed their A--- Caligula style with their claims that the character was "Perfected" in 1965 and copyright should begin there versus ending about that time.
Conan the Barbarian - the people who marginalized REH when he lived - at best leaving him to struggle to find work and help his aging and sick mother with lousy low paying jobs and needing to turn to writing to make ends meet. The damage to the character was they took a nice fee for big companies to make anything with Conan then viciously attacked any independent acts so no individual can pay $20K or more for a short story - even absolutely not using any Marvel or in copyright references. Even now nothing gets through without paying them, so even new works claiming to be as raw and blood and thunder as the stories have to cut out explicit things and smooth over non-pc things to get into big markets to maybe make up the toll.
But even these aren't the whole damage done by Disney...
The real damage is what we don't know about and will NEVER see - thanks to Disney.
There's a huge wealth of pulp fictions, odd stories, magazine fictions, obscure books and characters that never made it big in their times. There are things that were popular but then got forgotten after a while and sit dusty on used bookstore shelves. There's also always people who read anything and everything and discover these works - especially new writers...
This is the real torment here - as a writer of fictions I don't want to make a living off of another's work or have my legacy being only imitating other's works. Mind you writing for $ is a fool's game, you write because it is in you and if you are really, really lucky you make some $. Most of the time it's a sad waste of your life and your friends/family pity you - if only you did 'contracting' work or sat in a boring office working out new ways to lay off workers to ship their jobs to China or have a robot do it... I just want to write my own stories and hopefully be remembered by them - but also I am indebted to the many stories I read as a kid and into adulthood not caring if "That crumbling trashy pulp is 60+ years old...!" new to me. I want to make some careful but clever and loving tributes but that is a minefield even for obscure things very few people know about...
Absolutely you shouldn't be able to publish "Walden" by "your name here" that's plagiarism. Do your own work even if others don't get it - "If dolphins are so smart, why do they live in Igloos...?"
Or copy Disney Vinyl toys and sell them, that's trademark/copyright infringement.
My little AI fantasy above of a "Dismal Land" mall converted into a large spaced lord of the flies daycare would fall under the second... I'd do it if Disney would take over the "Dead Mall" and just put their characters there so kids had a nice big daycare and then they opened the mall, fixed it up and got more stores in... But nope, the property owner would show up with Mickey Mouse ears and thank me for being able to retire to Mexico when the dead property was bankrupting him - just by selling it full value to demolish it and here's 99% of the $ for the lease back. And hey, Disney would be in the right there.
BUT you should be able to use and reference other published characters without paying $30K for even an obscure one and trying for years to find the heirs, the estate, the "Rights". It could be argued you do NOT damage the character, even if its a merciless parody though most of these are loving tributes and they should pay you money if anything not that it should happen.
I'd love to be able to make references and use limited real examples of many characters, products, etc. in my fictions. Not in any way to "Steal" - rather there are tons of novels I've read that I love and would like to have a character appear as a tribute. These are things from the 40s or earlier and the 60s-mid 80s scifi and fantasy I've read. I could list dozens if I let myself think but this is already depressing to type. Wouldn't it be cool to have Sledgehammer come in for a few pages in my "A better 1980s" world? Or a buddy has an ...adult oriented.... scifi he's working on and would like to have just in name reference one of the late Jo Clayton's characters referenced just to see if anyone else read said book? And a Dominick Wytchburner story I'm working on has references to a cartoon I watched based on Eastern European small forest creatures - up to 3 apples high.
But nope, nope, nope and be very very VERY careful despite public domain mythology...
Too easy to get SUED. Not because I'd do any damage in any way to anyone else's property. No care that again most are Public Domain and mild use is within fair use.
Disney has done this
They have drank from the Public Domain but then blocked it for others to defend their largely Public Domain based properties.
They have wrecked critical cultural lessons by sanitizing fairytales to make money.
They have abused lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits to expand their rights even beyond the law and any real need to defend money or property.
In doing the former they enabled most/all of the Patent and Copyright trolls and even the false claim fraudsters by making it too easy to defend a claim of ownership with no criminal penalties for false claims or frivolous legal actions.
They now have a grotesque monopoly that should be broken up.
And that's only some of their crimes - for instance look up how workers have to wear each other's underwear and the laundry service is bad so it's often wet and sh-tty when it comes back...
BTW - the image above - Citing this article here - it seems that this was a poster published just after Steamboat Willie but within DAYS. That means the red pants and Yellow/White gloves ARE Public Domain also...
Time for people to do to Mickey Mouse what Disney done did to the Brother's Grimm...!
AND for us all to keep alert and support by $ by letters - by letters to Congressmen and Senators - by communicating with the ACLU, EFF and CBLDF to defend users of Public Domain from Disney... And to EXPAND Public Domain a bit and the protections. Penalties (civil and criminal) for false filings, a quick "Motion to Dismiss" for reasonable fair use and parody and a "You don't use it you LOSE it" for things like videogames no longer for sale.
---Maxx Feral
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