Joe Escalante live from Hollywood. By Hollywood, you mean Burbank, across the
street from a Wienerschnitzel. It sells beer. True story. People still don't
believe it. But that's what goes on here. This is two hours of
the business, end of show business. We do this every Sunday from five
pm to seven pm right here on k EIB. And we've been doing it
for I don't know, since two thousand and six or so. There's a
lot of shows like this now, but there was none forever. I mean,
there's no shows like this on live radio, I'll tell you that.
But there are podcasts. Some of them good, some of them just very
cringey. You're like Joe, You're pretty cringey. Okay, here's what we're
gonna do today. We're gonna do something special. I spoke this week at
the Southeast District Bar Association here in southern California on the topic of the public
domain. As Mickey Mouse falls into the public domain, what does that mean?
And all the people there got an hour of MCL credit, and now
you're going to get an hour of MCAL credit if you listen to this whole
thing. Actually, I don't know if that's true. I guess you could
fill out a form and it would qualify. But what is MCL credit.
That's for lawyers when they have to do their continuing education as lawyers to keep
up, keep their legal chops up. So they had a dinner and I
made a little talk and there's some pictures. Also. I'll put these pictures
on my Facebook page so you can see the pictures I'm talking about. This
is the Joe Ascolante Live from Hollywood Facebook page and this is from March twenty
seventh, twenty twenty four. But I'm doing it live right now because you
deserve it and it's going to be better. All right. We're going to
start this with the purpose of copyright. This is something I call the piece
You've got to eat your pis before we get to the fun stuff. You're
going to get a primer on copyright law, a little bit of trademark,
and some public domain stuff. Now, the primary purpose behind copyright law is
to quote foster the creation and dissemination of works for the benefit of the public.
That's from the Copyright Office. It's trying to encourage creativity and people to
create stuff by granting authors the exclusive right to authorize certain uses of their works.
Copyrights provide the economic incentive to create new works and to make them available
in the marketplace. So, in other words, if we let people make
money on their copyrights, they'll make more copyrights. Now, if you're one
of those people that says we shouldn't have copyright laws, there are many.
They're kind of like the people that says we shouldn't have borders on our countries.
That's a fine theory, and everybody's entitled to have their theories. But
we have decided as a society that we should have copyright laws that protect the
creators and allow them to make some money when they create something, and then
they might create more things, and then people will create really good things,
and then pretty soon you have, you know, Sergeant Peppers. Pretty soon
you have the movie High Noon, because people were allowed to make money from
their copyrights. If you don't let people make money, you're gonna have garbage.
So also, works are protected internationally, but they are done by treaties.
Can have a treaty with another country says if you protect our copyrights in
your country, will protect yours in this country. And those are good things
to have, like the Burn Convention is one the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright
Treaty otherwise known as WIPO. These are necessary. Now there's a lot of
weird stuff that goes in a lot in a lot of other countries, like
China. You know, they don't protect our copyrights. They just like to
steal. They send over spies here to collect information on corporate espionage, intellectual
property theft. That's just the way they operate there. That's the kind of
society they've decided because they're run by a state, and the state has decided,
hey, we got to own everything, and why should we leave it
up to chance. Let's send spies around the world and steal stuff and we'll
make our own and we'll be ahead because we want to be ahead for whatever
reason, I don't know. Then there's Mexico. Mexico has some weird copyright
thing. Well, they protect it for a while and instead of falling into
the public domain like it does here and so everybody can use it. And
we'll talk about that in a little bit, the government takes it. So
at a certain point, the government gets it and they get all the income
and fill their coffers. That's one thing I guess theoretically they spread it around.
I know people very happy with the Mexican government. The people I work
with at my church, you know, they're just like, I love this
president, go Bernadoora I think his name is. They love them. He's
great, did this, he did that, fights cartels, takes care of
the poor. So here we just think it's all corrupt down there. But
for some people they disagree. They might say this place is corrupt. Okay.
So so basically what you want to get out of this part is that
the copyright laws are there to encourage more copyrights. There's an actual Supreme Court
case that put it this way in nineteen seventy five. The immediate effect of
our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an author's creative labor.
But the ultimate name by this incentive is to stimulate artistic creativity for the general
public good. Now, that came out of the Supreme Court of the United
States in nineteen seventy five. Most lawyers, and I was speaking to lawyers
when I'm doing that when I'm right now kind of, but most lawyers don't
really know much about copyright, and they only hear about it when they're like
kid starts a band, or their kid writes a script, or their kid
or they decide to write their memoirs or write a novel or something like that,
and then they think immediately they got to copyright their novel. Who's going
to steal your novel? That's my first question. Who is going to steal
your novel? But I got people calling my show and saying, I just
wrote my novel. How do I copyright it? How I protect it from
someone stealing it? Who is going to steal your stinking off? This is
nobody. Who's going to publish in your novel? Nobody. If someone stole
your novel, you'd be very lucky because then you'd get some attention. If
you wrote a song, who's gonna steal that song? The answer is nobody.
So if someone stole your song, it'd be the greatest thing to happen
to your career, it would be my guess. But yes, you should
copyright your songs. And when I say copyright, I mean register the copyright.
You register a copyright, you get some protection. But the way that
the laws are now, you get protection when you create something. As soon
as you create it, you get you get federal protection you're going to federal
copyright. You're a government I mean yeah, I mean your your work is
protected by the latest copyright actor. We'll get into that a little bit as
we talk about the history of the copyright laws. Yeah, you didn't think
it was gonna it could get drier, but it can. Let's another thing
that people where they learn about copyrights is from just rumors. They hear about
about Disney, and we're going to talk more about Disney. Disney's very big.
They've played a big part in shaping the copyright laws in this country.
And one of the things they do is they send out letters if anybody's doing
the slightest infringement on one of their copyrights because they have heard from their lawyers
that only a vigorous, a vigorous policing of their copyright will give them the
protection they need. And if they don't vigorously protect their marks and their works,
that they could fall into the they could lose their trademarks. That's like
where usually that is talked about in the trademark area. And that's coming up
a little bit more. But right now we're gonna take a break. We're
gonna check the traffic and they're gonna have more on Joe'scalante Live from Hollywood.
Joe'scalante Live from Hollywood. We are back with the copyright Legal Lecture special.
Okay, let's continue on here with the copyright basics. Let's talk about Disney.
Now we talked about Disney. Disney. I wanted to make clear in
the last segment, Disney so vigorous in their defense of their marks and stuff
like that that they they kind of made like a chilling effect on the rest
of the world of whether people should mess with their copyrights. You're gonna if
you got a tattoo, you're going to get a letter in the mail.
That is, people like get this letter, they frame it. I don't
know how they find out you got a tattoo with Mickey Mouse, but that's
what goes on. And of course we're getting to the point where Mickey Mouse
and the Steamboat Willy cartoon and another cartoon fall into the public domain. It
happened on January first of this year. So right now we're just kind of
given the history and to see how we got to this point and what it
means. But first the basics continue. Now, who is eligible for a
copyright, what kind of works are eligible for a copyright. Generally, it's
anything that's minimally creative and can be fixed to a tangible medium. Now,
minimally creative it means exactly what it sounds like. If it's just a word
that's not minimally creative, you can't go co op copyright a word you can
copy, you can't. And here's the things you can't copyright. You can
copyright what mostly people are copyright are getting copyright protection for drawings and recordings and
sheet music and movies, even dance steps. But you have to copyright those
footprints, not a video of someone dancing the footsteps or dress patterns. Now,
remember the Pharrell case, Farrell and Robin Thick versus the Marvin Gay estate
a few years back. What Marvin Gay had a copyright in was some sheet
music, and Farrell and Robin Thick or just ruined for supposedly stealing the sound
and feel of a sound recording that wasn't really the copyright. That wasn't the
copyright. The copyright was the sheet music. That's what they registered. So
in that case they should have just played had someone come into court and play
the sheet music and see if they stole that they didn't steal, that they
would have won the case, but it was bad jury instructions. We've spoken
about that before, and this is probably what the worst thing that happens to
copyright holders or people who are just trying to, you know, record music
that is influenced by other people is that jury instructions are bad. So the
juries don't know what to go by. So the law, the legal cases
are sometimes just all over the map and stupid. So here's the things you
can here's some things you cannot copyright. Ideas and facts. If you have
an idea. If let's say you some grandpa in the garage tinkering with an
idea, and you're like, I got an idea for a better adult diaper,
I'm going to register that. You know what that would be. That
would be a patent. If you have an idea for a novel new adult
diaper, register patent. That's not a copyright, that's not a trademark.
So no ideas, no facts. What's a fact. If you have a
fact that says I have now discovered a new element in the elemental chart it's
this balloonium or something, well, okay, well that's a fact. There's
a new element. There's an element fact. You can't copyright that fact.
Can't copyright the discovery of that fact. If you used it for something,
you could get a patent. Okay, back to what You cannot copyright work
with an expired copyright like the Mickey Mouse one. You cannot recopyright it.
It expired. It's done. Works with no original authorship like some old you
know, traditional melody, or a bunch of people came up with it at
the same time and no one registered it. No one really knows. It's
in the zeitgeist. You can't register that our paintings are photographs by monkeys.
There's if you look in my the pictures on the Facebook page, the monkeys.
This monkey took a selfie of himself and it went to court and the
court said monkey can't own a copyright. So PETO wanted him to own the
copyright because then they could say, if the monkey can own a copyright,
then the monkey can have the kinds of rights and that kind of rights,
and they can take rights away from you. That's how peda is. You
can leave a message on my Facebook page if you disagree us government works cannot
be copyright cannot get copyright protection. Is there a word copyrighted? Is it
a verb? People use it as a verb. I try to avoid that.
You cannot register for copyright protection. You cannot receive copyright protection. If
it's a federal government work like you can go ahead and make a FBI shirt.
They can't do anything about it. However, state and local governments can
copyright their stuff, so be careful. Scientific principles, mathematical formulae, laws
of nature, as I talked about before, research methodologies, statistical techniques,
and theorems, whatever those are, cannot be copyright cannot receive copyright protection.
Laws and regulations, you don't get copyright protection like legislative reports. These are
just facts, really, So these kinds of a lot of this stuff all
comes to out of facts, words, names, numbers. A name you
cannot copyright a name, name of your business, the name of your band,
the name of anything cannot receive a copyright. What do you get for
your band or your business? You get a trademark, Rules of grammar,
recipes cannot be received copyright protection. Okay, and then I've talked a little
bit about trademark. Let's switch over to the trademark laws. A trademark is
any word, phrase, or symbol, or a design that identifies your goods
or services. It is how products or services are recognized and distinguished from each
other. So if you have a band, it's your band's called the Vandals,
you can get a trademark in that band name because that distinguishes your band
from other marks, other people's bands. And a big thing that it does
is it it'll give you legal protection for your brand, but it also helps
the public. It might help you from counterfeiting and fraud. But it helps
the public from counterfeiting and fraud. And how does the public get harmed from
counterfeiting and fraud? They get harmed by something called the false designation of origin.
If you are looking at some kind of dog food for your dog,
and this one says it's called Hill's brand, super healthy dog food, and
then someone else comes up with super healthy dog food calls it Hills brand,
but it's not healthy dog brood and it's made out of a kangaroo byproducts or
something. You wouldn't know that that was not where you usually get your healthy
dog food, and you might get your dog killed. So it doesn't only
protect humans, it protects dogs, so Peter wants to get behind them,
you know, go ahead. So think about this. Copyright law protects the
author, the creator. Trademark law protects the customer. The public primarily got
that that is a good way to think about it. Now, Trademark laws
expire after five years when you register them. It's pretty short, right,
We've got like ninety five years in the copyright area. Trademarks can expire in
five years, but you can register it again, and then after that you're
going to register it for ten years and then every ten years. You got
to do it. You got to be vigilant. You can't trademark things that
you're just sitting on. You have to be using them. In interstate commerce,
you can't trademark an idea and just say oh, I might use it
someday, or trademark a name for it's for a product associated with the product.
You know, maybe you have a beer where you want to call it
pp beer or something. I'm just making up bad things right now, and
you got that would be a good name for a beer, peepe beer.
Everybody loves peepee beer. But you don't make the beer. Well, you
can. You could register an intent to make peepee beer, and you might
go through, but six months later it's gonna expire, and someone else could
say come in and say I want to make peepe beer, but I'm actually
gonna make it, and I'm going to register this and that other one is
abandoned. It's an abandoned mark. Trademark got to renew them. But it
will never expire. You can keep doing it forever. It's the copyright.
You don't have to keep registering it every year, every ten year or whatever,
butter eventually it will disappear. Now I'm going to take a break and
come back more with Joe's Galantid Live from Hollywood, Special Copyright Lecture Edition Joe
Scalante Live from Hollywood. If by Hollywood you mean Burbank, and we are
talking to Hollywood people right now, and you creators, authors, composers,
filmmakers, and we're going with a extendo copyright lecture to give you a primer
on copyright, trademark and public domain because everybody's talking about it because Mickey Mouse,
certain elements of Mickey Mouse fell into the public domain recently, and it's
the number one thing on people's lips when they talk to me about intellectual property.
What's going to happen. Well, we're going to get there, but
for now we're just kind of moving kind of methodically. And if you miss
part of this, you could get it on the podcast version of the show,
which comes out every Sunday night. It gets put together and this radio
show becomes a podcast. Okay, this radio show has been going on longer
than there was a word of a podcast, So now it's just it's kind
of like both. Now let's go to the fair use doctrine. This is
an exception to the copyright law. With the fair use doctrine, it is
possible for you to use somebody's copy, somebody's material that has copyright protection and
is registered without asking permission and without paying them. This would be the fair
use doctrine. There are four elements of a fair use doctrine case if you
want to use it. This comes up a lot in documentaries because people,
you know, there's a lot of protected marks and copyrights and stuff in documentaries,
and how do they get to be in there. Well, some of
it is the fair use doctrine, or most of it maybe. Now the
fair use doctrine is now in the copyright law. It's not just a theory
that you could argue. Now, let's say you want to use something like
a picture and you want to use it in your movie. Okay, there's
an author of that picture. The picture has an author olds the copyright.
Don't you need to get this permission? Maybe? Maybe not? Maybe don't
you need to pay him? Maybe? Maybe not? If you're just showing
it because you like the way it looks and it's helping your documentary or worse,
helping your fictional movie, which would be even harder to get in a
fair use argument, you would have to ask that person for permission, get
their permission, get a license to use that. But if you're commenting on
the picture itself, you would not have to get a permission or pay any
money because you have a rite of free speech to comment on that picture,
and you cannot comment on the picture effectively without showing the picture you have.
Okay, so here's the four I'll go there over the four elements. Now
that you've had like a case study here in your mind. Okay, So
the court would look when they're trying to figure out whether you use something in
the in the fair use under a fair use doctrine, and as you can
see it would be probably very expensive to even get to this point in court.
So you want to just make sure you know what you're doing, and
sometimes you might just forget about it. Okay, So the court is going
to analyze the purpose and character of your use. Was it transformative. Let's
say you took a here's the example that two examples. There's a maybe an
article about logging. Someone wants to express the dangers of logging, and they
are tree huggers or whatever. So in this case, someone took a bunch
of photographs of they took their own photographs, let's say, of some horrible
things happening to the forest as the result of logging. Then they spliced in
a speech that had copyright protection from a guy in the logging industry, and
they wanted to show that everything he said was maybe false, or it has
another side to it, or they're going to dramatize it by showing a picture.
So this guy who wrote the speech says, well, I'm going to
get him for reprinting my speech without permission. But the court in that case
would say, well, that was a speech, guy. But now because
of the use that the defendants made of it, it was transformative. It
was transformed from your speech to a compelling statement about logging practices. It was
like a political statement. So now it's like political speech. It has more
protection than regular speech. So you cannot stop people from creating this message by
juxtaposing these pictures with your words, because they transformed it into something else,
So you lose the court's look at the nature of the copyrighted work itself.
Was it a factual story or a fictional story? Because it would be harder
to take somebody's stuff and put it in your fictional story than it you know,
because how are you analyzing something if it's in a fictional story. It
just be harder. If it's a documentary a factual story, of course,
analyze that photo or that poem or something. And then you would need to
show the photo and at least an excerpt from the phone to make your First
Amendment rights complete. Is it a published work or an unpublished work, Believe
it or not. Unpublished work, they get a lot of protection because those
are like more private. Once you publish something, there's a lot of you.
You lose a little bit of your control over it. Number three,
the amount and substantiality of the portion taking. Let's say you take the whole
song and you analyze a song, but you recorded the song, and now
nobody has to buy the song because he can get it from you for free.
A photo, you reprint the whole photo and make a comment on it
now, or you make a poster of the photo. Look at this,
I'm commenting on this photo, and here's my poster of it. Now you
took away the poster market. There's a movie called Expelled by Ben Stein where
he was trying to get the message across that religion has been trivialized in our
nation today. So he used the example of the song Imagine by John Lennon.
In that song, there are lyrics that say imagine no religion. So
he said, look, this is the most popular songwriter in the world,
and he said imagine no religion. Like that's supposed to be a great thing.
Do you see how a public the modern artists don't. Not only do
they not like religion, they say it would be a better place in general
without it. So that's his message. So to demonstrate that that is a
powerful message in the pop culture, he plays the song, but he doesn't
play all the song. He only plays as much as he needs to make
that point across Yoko Ono Susan. They go to court. Ben Stein wins
because his movie made a message, and the court said, you know what,
he had to play some of that song to make his point, and
he didn't take too much of it. He only took a little bit of
it. And then the fourth prong is what would the effect of this use
in the fair use have on the original product. Nobody's gonna not buy or
download the Imagine song just because ben Stein put a little bit of it in
his movie, So that's what. Then the other prongs of the fair use
doctrine. Fairy doctrine is very handy, and we really need that for people
to be able to make documentaries and to make parodies and stuff like that.
All right, so now we're going to go into the public domain. What
is the public domain? The public domain is where stuff goes when the copyrights
expire or if they never had a copyright. So work is generally considered to
be within the public domain if it is ineligible for a copyright protection or its
copyright has expired. Public Domain works can serve the foundation for new creative works.
So you can take a copyrighted work and you can monkey with it and
make a new work. And society has decided, here's society again that after
a certain amount of time, protection isn't really needed, and it's time to
let other people have a crack. Examples of stuff that people have had a
crack on and improved upon, or you know, made, was movies like
movies about Anne of Green Gables that is from nineteen oh eight, that's in
the public domain, Movies about Black Beauty eighteen seventy seven, Christmas Carol eighteen
forty three. What would the world be like if we didn't have any Christmas
Carol stories or movies when Charles Dickens wrote this in eighteen forty three. We
don't need to give the descendants of Charles Dickens's control over this forever. It's
better to let people take a crack at it, and we have plays and
musicals and all kinds of stuff like that. Count Dracula eighteen ninety seven,
same thing, Journey to the Center of the Earth eighteen sixty four, Wizard
of Oz nineteen hundred, although the Wizard of Oz movie it wasn't in the
public domain when they made that. The big movie, but it is now
and people can do weird stuff with it if they want. So let's let's
just let that continue. Okay. So we're going to take another break,
and when we come back, we're going to show you how the history of
the Mickey Mouse character mirrors US copyright law. And this is how ultimately Mickey
Mouse, as of January first, ends up in the public domain. Joe
Scalante Live from Hollywood, back after this, Joe ask Alanti, here's my
lawyer. You don't want money. Joe Scalante Live from Hollywood by Hollywood,
Mean Burbank or continuing the copyright mcl E lecture did I gave last week for
the Southeast District Bar Association. Okay, So the history of Mickey Mouse mirrors
the history of US copyright right law. Steamboat Willie debuts in nineteen twenty eight,
and it is operating under the protection of the Copyright Act of nineteen oh
nine. And before nineteen oh nine, the last major revision of the copyright
laws was the Copyright Act of eighteen seventy. Methods of reproducing and duplicating work
subject to copyright had significantly increased in that time, you know, as the
modern world's coming up since the First Copyright Act in seventeen ninety. So you
see that the Copyright Act has been around. They've been having them since seventeen
ninety. And actually, if you looked in the US Constitution, this will
blow your mind. Article one, Section eight, Clause eight. The Congress
shall have power to promote the progress of science and use arts by securing,
for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and
discoveries. That's in the US Constitution. Okay, that's at the very beginning
of this country. Now, it's that important seventeen ninety First Copyright Act,
and now we're still operating off these modifications of nineteen oh nine. And then
in nineteen oh eight there was a case where the Supreme Court said that manufacturers
of panola music roles you know in those player pianos, were not required to
pay the royalties to the composers because that wasn't it didn't fit the definition in
which at that time was definition was a written or printed record of intelligible notation.
You know, they have no recordings at that time. They haven't invented
these weird little cylinders that play on make pianos play so it was just written
a printed record. So they had to change the lot to night the law,
and in nineteen oh nine they change that so that the piano player piano
composers could get their royalties. Then we have to go fast forward to the
Copyright Act of nineteen seventy six. Disney's getting a little nervous things might be
falling into the public domain that they made, and so their lobbying to get
tougher laws, and you know, laws that will protect authors. And they
always say this protects authors and creators and writers, but what they're really saying
is it corrects. It protects their giant, multi million dollar, billion dollar
in multinational corporation. But that's okay because they make Disneyland when you let them
have their things, and you know, good movies like Blackbeard's Ghost. If
you haven't seen it, you should see it. Foremost among the changes introduced
in nineteen seventy six was the creation of a federal copyright protection for every work
as soon as it is created, that is, when it is first fixed
in a tangible medium of expression, which could be that little wax role for
the player, piano, could be a movie, could be a digital file.
So Now you get protection as soon as you make something. You don't
have to register it and put an R on it in a date and all
that complicated stuff that you used to have to do that caused a lot of
things to fall into the public domain before their time. Now all you have
to do is create it. Once you create it, it has protection.
Now why would you register it. You would register it to get two things.
Number one, attorney's fees if you have an infringement case and you win.
And number two, you can sue for statutory damages, which are huge.
Now you can get a lawyer to take it on a contingency basis because
the lawyer is looking at all this money they're going to get and so they're
going to pay the upfront costs. That really helps the small guy. And
otherwise you'll never get a lawyer to take your case because they'll be charging you
five hundred dollars an hour one thousand dollars an hour. I heard about a
lawyer the other day that makes thirty five hundred dollars an hour. So you
need to have that contingency so that they will hey the upfront costs and they'll
split it with you if they win. Now later, we have this Sunny
Bono Copyright Term Extension Act that came about in nineteen ninety eight, and that
is, you know, was when Sunny Bono, the singer of you two
well as a congressman, right, you know, I'm right. So they
also called that the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, and that extended the copyright laws
a little more. In the nineteen seventy six Act, a copyright would last
for the life of the author plus fifty years for the last surviving offer,
or seventy to five years from publication or one hundred years after creation, whichever
is shorter. Okay. The nineteen seventy six Acts also increased the renewal terms
for copyrights that were done before nineteen seventy eight. It's a little technical,
don't worry about it. Nineteen ninety eight Act extended this to seventy years for
works of corp authorship, for seventy years for people that regular authors, in
ninety five years for corporate authorship, or one hundred and twenty years after creation.
This law effectively froze the advancement date of the public domain in the United
States for works covered under the older fixed term copyrights. Under this Act,
works made in nineteen twenty three or after. This is where Steamboat Willy comes
in, would not enter to the public domain until twenty nineteen or later.
Mickey Mouse specifically having first appeared in nineteen twenty eight, and Steamboat Willy entered
the public domain in twenty twenty four January. First, you remember that it
just happened. Maybe you saw the vandals shirts on vandals dot com. We
have a whole line of Vandal's Steamboat Willy style Mickey Mouse shirts and they're selling
like hotcakes. I'm not here to sell you t shirts, but they are
selling like hotcakes. So this is crazy. And people thought where they were
panicking, and Disney was especially panicking because they had such a history of enforcing
their copyrights and going after people, that what's going to happen Now They're going
to lose some of their Mickey Mouse stuff they had already lost. We need
the Pooh, and we need the Pooh. Someone made a movie last year
a couple of years ago called Blood and Honey, and where we need the
Pooh is a murderer. You can even make we Need the Pooh look like
a murderer. It's in the public domain. You can do whatever you want
once in the public domain, even if it seems to hurt the present day.
We need the Pooh. There's a steamboat Willy horror film, same thing.
Mickey Mouse is a murderer. Doesn't that harm? Isn't that defamation?
Or isn't that, you know, unfair? I don't know. Courts are
allowing it. They got a First Amendment right to take an old thing and
make it new again and do whatever you want with it. You can make
it, you know, like I say, these are derivative works, these
are adaptations. You can and make a theme park ride. You can do
whatever you want with these things. Now as long as you're not you got
to use the steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse. Okay, remember that. If you
want to make a Mickey Mouse thing, you got to use that one.
Or there's one called plane Crazy. You can actually distribute these cartoons yourself if
you want too, now that they're in their public domain. If you get
a copy of it, you can make a copy yourself and sell DVDs of
it. It's in the public domain. Go ahead. So why do they
allow this? You know? They allow this so new cool things can be
created. Now, do new cool things get created. Yeah, they do,
and we know that because we've seen Walt Disney himself do it. He
went out and got snow White Alice in Wonderland that's at eighteen sixty five product.
Hunchback of Notre Dame that's an eighteen thirty one product. Where would we
be without Walt Disney's The Jungle Book, one of my favorite movies of all
time, that was made in eighteen ninety four. When he got it,
it was in the public domain. So this is what most people are asking
about. Peter Pan. Peter Pan's a special case because of the government.
The UK government extended that copyright like in perpetuity because all the royalties were left
to a like a something called the Great Ormond Street Hospital, you know,
for children, and so the government said, all right, we're going to
keep that when going so all that money goes to that charity. But in
general, you know, things run out and you get to go do whatever
you want to do to them with them. To them, just stay away
from the modern versions of these products. Don't put Mickey Mouse in a wizard
suit like from Fantasia, and just stick with the old Mickey Mouse and you're
going to be fine. And since this happened January first, you know,
I haven't seen a lot other than the horror film. And the horror film's
probably going to be terrible, and it's going to fade away in history.
It's not going to hurt Mickey Mouse too much. The vandal shirts selling great,
but where ours are just cute and we appreciate it. And Walt Disney
appreciated the public domain, so I don't think he's turning in his grave or
anything. And this is just the natural evolution of intellectual property. Box,
and that's it for me. I hope you liked your copyright intellectual property lecture
and I will see you next time on Joe'scalante Live from Hollywood. You can
look at a lot of these pictures on my Facebook page and it'll make a
little more sense. Ab