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Comment by madebysquares | Hacker News Reader

They discuss is briefly but my understanding is the copyright only protects the work itself. IE the movie steamboat willie could now be freely published by anyone with access to it? But Disney will still own the trademark and be the only entity that can produce new original Mickey Mouse content?

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> ...and be the only entity that can produce new original Mickey Mouse content?

This is confusing to me. If copyright is up on Steamboat Willie, producing derivative works based on Steamboat Willie has to be allowed, so original content that remixes and adds to Steamboat Willie to make a new cartoon must be OK.

That’s correct. But Disney has trademarks around Mickey. So you can’t call your work Mickey Mouse. And you may find yourself in court if your work too closely matches any of the trademarks Disney has on the Mouse. So it will be risky as Disney may wish to drown you in legal filings based not on copyright but trademarks.

You'll probably find yourself in court in any case. That doesn't mean that Disney is right, just powerful.

And there is such a thing as fair use in a trademark. Being descriptive is fair use of a trademark. You can market your breadbox as being compatible with Acme Bread. And you can describe your Sherlock Holmes book as containing Sherlock Holmes and as an extension to the public domain canon.

I don't see why Mickey Mouse gets special treatment just because he's also on logos and such. Disney, at the least, is forcing a conflict between trademark law and public domain law to see what it can get away with.

Trademarks are about protecting the use of "marks" (i.e., logos, names, etc.) for use in "trade". So having a trademark on Mickey Mouse means that you can't use Mickey Mouse to advertise or promote your product, and this can probably construed broadly (e.g., sample screenshots of a game, packaging material). Even if it can't Disney is not known for being shy on litigation, and it's totally possible for them to sue you even if they have only a slim chance of victory. Using Mickey Mouse as a cameo would be totally legal if he's not used to advertise it, although the tricky part could be holding that the cameo comes from public domain work and not later, still-copyrighted derivatives.

Sherlock Holmes appears in unauthorized works even though some of the original Doyle works are not public domain, but I'm not sure how trademark complicates things.

Disney will be forced to produce new content to retain the trademark on old-style Mickey. Steamboat Willie looks nothing like Mickey Mouse.

I think you might be confused on who Steamboat Willie is.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d4/Mickey_Mouse....

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BODZhY2E...

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