Infestation 88
- Thread starter Paladin
- Start date
You can tell they were just waiting for the ball to drop.
My favorite part is that they stuck SO closely to the whole "only the version in Steamboat Willie is up, not Mickey Mouse as a whole" notion (though I think two other cartoons entered at the same time?), this one still has the hat!
My favorite part is that they stuck SO closely to the whole "only the version in Steamboat Willie is up, not Mickey Mouse as a whole" notion (though I think two other cartoons entered at the same time?), this one still has the hat!
I know for a fact that there are some old Looney Tunes cartoons that fell into the public domain years ago because Warner Bros. just never bothered to renew the copyrights, and have made the rounds on various tapes with horrendously off-model cover art. Someone's going to have to explain to me why Disney no longer owns Mickey but Warner Bros. still owns Bugs and Porky. Does Steamboat Willie's status as his very first cartoon have something specific to do with it?
Disney still owns Mickey Mouse the character. They have his name trademarked and that will never expire. The copyright to Steamboat Willie is what they lost, and thus people can now use the content of that short to their heart's content, so long as they don't actually use the name "Mickey Mouse" proper.
It's the same deals as when those no-name DVD distributors were able to put early WB cartoons on those $1 DVDs. The copyrights expired on the earliest Warner Bros cartoons, allowing them to be redistributed.
There is nothing Disney can do to prevent people from redistributing the original couple of Disney cartoons (LOTS of Youtube uploads the past couple days), BUT people can't claim trademark or make new content of Mickey Mouse without Disney's approval.
There is nothing Disney can do to prevent people from redistributing the original couple of Disney cartoons (LOTS of Youtube uploads the past couple days), BUT people can't claim trademark or make new content of Mickey Mouse without Disney's approval.
Nonsense. It's making new content of a horrific monster that just so happens to look a lot like the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse, but isn't actually considered the same entity as Mickey Mouse from a legal standpoint because it isn't actually named "Mickey Mouse" and doesn't take inspiration from the traditional, red-pantsed, falsetto-voiced, official version of Mickey Mouse that Disney does still own and can still fight to protect the copyright of. Therein lie the legal loopholes that this game is taking full advantage of.
