Disney Claims Trademark over Loki
twitter.com
twitter.com
From the screenshot in the tweet
> [...] We had to remove your artwork from the Redbubble marketplace, because it _may_ contain material that violates someone's rights. (Emphasis added)
> In most cases, this means that the rights holder did not specifically identify your work for removal, but that Redbubble has detected potential similarity between your removed work and one or more words, phrases, or images in the right holder's removal guidance.
It seems that Disney gave Redbubble a blanket list of keywords. The item in question is entitled "Low Key Loki", and despite not containing any depiction of the Disney/Marvel character, was removed because Loki was in the name.
The title just says “claims trademark over Loki” which may be semi-inaccurate (they may be claiming copyrights or other authorship rights) but I mean, you are complaining that the title is inaccurate for being pointed at “a specific work” and, like, the title doesn't say any such thing. I would have written “claims trademark over ‘low key’” and that might have indeed been a little more misleading in one way, but more illustrative in another...
Judging by the name, and the fact that the wikipedia article contains zero instances of the word "trademark", I'm going to guess "no".
Although the claims are an outrage too.
Why? Most people will never have even heard of, much less care, about Loki or Norse mythology in any context until Marvel and Disney came along. Now far more people are aware of the mythological version through the popular version than ever.
Also, no one is attempting to replace the mythological Loki with the Marvel version, not even Disney is trying to burn copies of the Eddas or break carvings of Loki Taliban style. That's not even the only version of Loki that appears in modern pop culture.
Also, don't talk about cheekbones or silly costumes when this[0] is your template.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Processed_SAM_loki.jpg
I doubt that's the case. Thor for example at least has been pretty popular from before, maybe on the level of Zeus, I'm guessing Loki was at least half as popular of a mythological character.
Even separately, I must've read at least 10 fantasy works with a trickster god named Loki.
From my perspective, Norse mythology was maybe not quite as generally known as the Greek/Roman pantheon (outside of northern Europe anyway). But it was certainly not obscure--at least as far as the Odin, Thor, Loki basics.
I'd be willing to bet that the majority of Americans who can give a vaguely correct answer to Who is Loki? (or Who is Thor?) know that answer because of Marvel at some point in their lives.
That’s safe to say. Thursday is literally Thor’s day
Previously I was able to tell people these stories and they would enjoy them for what they are. Now most people giggle at them because they can only think of the Marvel characters.
If there are any modern “pagan” worshippers of the traditional gods, I hope they’ve preserved the fundamental version. Probably closer to any truths.
I’m not exactly sure how they worship their gods, but I’ve heard there are some feasts and artwork dedicated to certain gods. In Iceland most people (even Christians and Atheists) attend a “Þorrablót” which is feasting in honor of Þór.
When I speak of the old gods, I throw Yaweh (God or Allah depending on the sect) in there as well. A 5000 year old run counts as an old god in my book.
I like to look at the media depictions of these characters and compare them to their mythological counterparts. Disney's Hercules was ridiculous and a missed opportunity. But the way they depicted Maui was really, really good -- and when you consider that Maui is slightly different in every Polynesian culture that discussed him -- almost plausible as legitimate Polynesian mythology.
:-o
For one datapoint, when I grew up in England, you'd learn about the Greek Myths and the Norse Myths in school.
I was an adult before I ever heard of the Marvel comics.
I can't stand that this is part of the "justice" system. The outcome of a case should depend on its merits, not the litigants' war chest. Anything less invites corruption.
The English legal system was setup for aristocrats not peasants. We changed a lot about how the criminal side works, but very little about the civil.
No, I don't think so. It wouldn't completely shock me if it was true, but I wouldn't expect it.
My prior is that Redbubble has a list of words that just trigger takedowns or at least reviews, and "Loki" is one of them. I don't think Disney needs to threaten companies like Redbubble over every individual item, they can file a normal takedown request. I suspect that Redbubble is just generally scared of Disney overall, and that fear leads them to issue broad takedowns without the need for any other inputs.
I don't know for certain, but I suspect this is an unprompted, voluntary move by Redbubble.
The DMCA in its current form chills both free speech and industry, and it should be revised or repealed.
But, I suspect that Disney did not directly threaten Redbubble over this specific shirt. My guess is that this takedown is a product of the system, not a product of a specific phone call from a lawyer.
Are you using “the DMCA” as shorthand for “the risk of contributory infringement lawsuits which predates the DMCA and which the DMCA safe harbor provisions mitigate”, or something else?
This creates an environment where platforms are extremely trigger-happy to remove content. There is very little reason not to take down every piece of content you get a request for, even if it's obviously fair use, because refusing to take it down opens you up for liability as a platform. Compare this to something like Section 230, where platforms are just not liable for 3rd-party content period. They don't have to worry so much that they're going to suddenly get dragged into court because they refused to listen to someone who complained about a likely legal piece of content.
The DMCA safe harbor is better than making platforms directly liable, and a repeal of just the safe harbor laws and nothing else would be pretty bad. But lots of things are better than making platforms directly liable, that's not a high bar to clear. Even with the safe harbor provisions, it's still generally a harmful piece of legislation because it strongly incentivizes thoughtless takedowns.
Also worth noting that DMCA does not simply maintain status quo on copyright law outside of the safe harbors, it also expanded copyright in a number of harmful ways (most infamously barring circumvention of DRM). Those parts aren't so relevant to what we're talking about, but I do want to bring up that there are plenty of other reasons beyond the current situation with Redbubble to criticize the law.
> the risk of contributory infringement lawsuits which predates the DMCA
Don't get me wrong, I'm also open to revising/repealing some of them, but they weren't the thing I was referring to in this comment.
That's actually a controversial judicial expansion of 230 which has, AFAIK, only been been explicitly endorsed by one federal appeals circuit (and which there is a very strong case from the text of the CDA is the wrong interpretation), though I don’t know that any circuit has ruled the other way (cases which would turn on the distinction are not super common); on its face 230 only removes publisher liability under the conditions it provides, which would, under the rules applicable pre-230 (and not offline content still), leave distributor liability. Distributor liability is notice-based, much like contributory infringement under the DMCA safe harbor regime, though it operates on actual notice, rather than requiring adherence to a prescribed procedure.
Regardless, Section 230 as it is applied today protects distributors like Twitter from liability for hosting illegal content in a way that the DMCA as it is applied does not. Reworking the DMCA to work more like the common interpretation of Section 230 by companies and the courts would be a large improvement over the current DMCA.
Whatever the law's intent, in practice platforms like Twitter, Youtube, and Redbubble are strongly incentivized to remove any content they think might be infringing without considering fair use or the validity of the takedown requests they get. This incentive and its effects are much more noticeable with the DMCA then they are with most other liability laws online, including Section 230. And that incentive is harmful for creativity, industry, and speech.
Congress—both parties, for different reasons—seems more in the vein of “the basic idea of 230 is wrong in any case and we need to broadly restore publisher liability” (though most of the specific examples cited for that position seem to be situations where the host had actual notice, so there's probably a good argument that the expansive application of 230 beyond its text is a central part of the reason it keeps getting chipped away at); I think Justice Thomas wrote extensively on the distributor liability argument in a dissent (maybe concurrence) to a decision that turbed on another issue.
The DMCA as it's applied today has a lot of unintended consequences and problems. For Section 230 to be interpreted in the same way would not equalize the two laws and make both of them unproblematic, that would just be a world where content was as vulnerable to stuff like frivolous libel takedown requests as it currently is to frivolous copyright takedown requests. It would be a disaster for the Open Internet.
My take is that we can look at the application of the DMCA today and see its effects, and view that as pretty strong evidence that this approach doesn't really work and that very little else in regards to platform/distributor liability online should be set up to work like the DMCA does. So I would love to see the DMCA revisited and the takedown provisions dropped.
This. Then the tech news and commentators on HN, etc., get agitated and complain about IP rights as if the actual lines are drawn where the scared platform owners think they are.
Forcing platforms to host material that may, arguably infringe copyrights or trademarks isn’t a solution.
What’s needed are bright-line rules for determining fair use. Bright-line rules, however, are basically impossible for all but the simplest cases. Most cases are far too nuanced or deal with novel uses.
https://www.simplybible.com/f744-revln-seven-powers-of-chris...
Jesus as Superhero is a common Christian theme:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jesus+superhero
But they'd have to either treat him as a Mary Sue, and be boring, or make him a character with human flaws, which would offend people.
On the other hand, if you go onto the dark side of YouTube, there's a guy named Professor Geek. His traditionalist views on mythological heroes and opposition to the injection of current-year politics into modern mythological media like comic books automatically make him a mouthpiece of the alt-right and anything he says is not to be trusted. But should you trust some of the things he says, there are interesting perspectives in his videos on the two major types of hero: the aspirational hero, a character representing an ideal to be striven for; and the cathartic-motivational hero, a flawed character who is struggling to approach the ideal. Think Superman and Batman.
Jesus is clearly supposed to be an aspirational hero. His story is not supposed to be that of a flawed person struggling to be better. He is a template to show what a good person looks like: become more like Jesus, and you will be better. The Christian answer to the cathartic-motivational hero is Saul of Tarsus. Maybe some of the Apostles also count.
So even though I personally find Jesus boring (and this was a factor in me renouncing my Christian faith), the Jesus narrative does serve a mythological function.
This story has everything a Christian could hope to be. Accepting Jesus, Jesus as the ultimate human, repentance, and the forgiveness of once sins.
So, no, this is in the controversy you think it is.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210409183213/https://www.redbu...
And while the design itself is ambiguous, I'll note that the t-shirt tags specifically include "marvel t-shirts" in the list, and the All Product Tags list includes "marvel" as well.
That would seem to contradict the idea that this was intended to be a reference to the Gaiman character.
Edit:
A commenter below noted that the person's profile picture, which includes this t-shirt, clearly references the Marvel character as well:
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1337356777113985024/e-a...
So no, I think you're mistaken and this t-shirt was a reference to the Marvel IP.
Marvel has never referred to their Loki (at least in the movies) as "Low Key"
Edited to add: Note that I think there's very much a good argument to be made that this stuff does or should fall well in bound of what fans can do in referencing a work, I just think that "it's not even the same character!" is off base.
Oh, gosh, I forgot: trademark protects consumers, not Intellectual Property Purveyors! A different logic holds true in this case: only the real, divinity of Loki deserves the trademark! Some bullshit court ploy by Disney to fob off their fake, CGI-generated non-god as the version that deserves a trademark is essentially blasphemy!
Where are you getting that from? The only artwork I see linked in the takedown request on Twitter is the words "Low Key" in a generic-looking font.
Is there a fan art of the Marvel character someplace that I'm not seeing?
The creator specifically says it waa a comic reference, so technically (1) the word “movie” is incorrect and it should be “comic”, but (2) the larger point is correct: it was fan art of the Marvel (Disney subsidiary) property explicitly trading on the name of the character which is a trademark (the name of the work is “Low Key Loki”). This isn't a use outside of the trademarked context, or to refer to the preexisting mythological character, or a phrase which is simply similar coincidentally.
That’s in American Gods published by Dark Horse comics not Marvel/Disney.
The words, in green, “LOW KEY.”
I think you are rushing a bit aggressively to Disney's defense here.
That’s the thing about stuff in the public domain it shows up everywhere with multiple people independently making the same jokes.
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1337356777113985024/e-a...
I'm saying that selling a shirt inspired by and using branded colors from a comic while admitting that it was a reference to said comic might be covered under a trademark.
I'm also saying that's a lot more limited than any use of the word Loki, though the marketplace may be erring on the side of protecting from the giant corporation here anyway.
The exact text is "Low Key," which as a pseudonym for Loki predates Marvel's use by at least a few years when Neil Gaiman used it for Loki in American Gods.
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:tv...
As others have noted it seems to be a slippery slope, where Disney eventually can block most uses of Loki, though i hope the courts will stop that.
I wonder what would happen to this danish cartoon named Valhalla from 1986 if it had been created in 2021.
1) Does Disney have a claim? Maybe, maybe not. 2) Should redbubble have removed it? Maybe, maybe not. 3) Should the OP take legal action? Maybe, maybe not 4) Do most people know the different between patent, trademark and copyright? Maybe, probably not.
The main problem here imho is the use of the middle-man, redbubble. That way you have close to zero protection from whatever they think is legally appropriate regardless of whether Disney would win in Court. If you host your own content then your risk appetite is entirely your own, although you would probably still lose in Court because money buys smart legal teams (usually).
Still stinks of bullying though.
(Alternatives include copyright protection for fictional character... If the depicted fictional character was Marvel's Loki... yellow horns, green jacket, Tom Hiddleston's face... Disney may have a valid copyright claim, not trademark).
But who's to say that Disney's rendition of this character was directly inspired by public domain prior art? In this case, why wouldn't the Disney/Marvel character also be in the public domain ab initio due to it's lack of being original?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Louis_Hu...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Loki_fin...
Historical art of Loki don't look much like the Disney / Marvel version of Loki.
So there is an element of referencing Marvel Loki, but not in any way that is wholly original to Marvel's depiction.
This does appear to be a reference to the Marvel/Disney version; the icon of the person posting this is a picture of Marvel/Disney Loki wearing a green/white shirt that says "LOW KEY" on it. https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1337356777113985024/e-a...
Disney sure does have a long-ass history of trademarking the public domain, though, so I'm not inclined to cut them any slack here.
The image also has the generic Redbubble message that basically says "we have removed your artwork because keywords in your description matched keywords that megacorporations have told us they will hassle us over". The next step in this process is to reply to the email saying "what the fuck" in a polite fashion and request a human review, and also to make a public tweet with this saying "what the fuck".
... but my memory's telling me the law was changed some time after the Donkey Kong suit to strengthen a company's ability to create independently-protectable derivative work from public domain material. Unfortunately, I lack details.
(Gaiman is my only reference)
Instead of the obvious solution of having Loki shapeshift into Freya and do some mischief, they decide to dress Thor up in a wedding gown and pass him off as Freya, with Loki having to explain to the giant why "Freya" has a beard and guzzles mead by the gallon and her eyes seem to burn red like hateful coals.
Needless to say, it works, because giants are stupid, and Thor gets his hands on his hammer again, and hijinks ensue.
And by hijinks I mean a bloodbath. And giants have a lot of blood.
There really should not be any discussion here. Disney cannot hold trademarks on Norse gods. They have copyright protection on specific drawings, movies etc, but that should be the limit of that.
Like it or not, Disney absolutely has the right to enforce that mark.
In most cases, this means that the rights holder did not specifically identify your for removal, but Redbubble has detected potential similarity between your removed work and one or more words, phrases or images included in the rights holder's removal guidance.
It looks like Redbubble is the one that doesn't understand how to enforce copyright properly.
The artwork in question is a definite direct reference to this https://www.reddit.com/r/Marvel/comments/cwiix0/loki_2_cover... , which Disney is absolutely going to beat the drum on enforcing (because if they aren't selling that t-shirt in Disney stores yet, they will within a quarter; they're hot on Loki right now with their Disney+ show). Artist may have gotten away with it if they hadn't called the work "Low Key Loki," but their intent seems extremely clear.
It sucks, but this kind of thing is actually what intellectual property law is supposed to protect against.
IANAL.
Copyright is kind of loose. Gaiman and Marvel can both base a character off of the character of Norse mythology because that character is public domain. That doesn't mean either is a reference to each other. There are certain character traits that are contained within that mythology. Certain things are added by Gaiman or Marvel that are specific to their interpretations and those could be protected under copyright.
But could is not is. It really depends on how much of a deviation those details are. Or how much can be extrapolated from public characterization.
Loki and Thor being adopted brothers is probably off-limits to Gaiman as that is something Marvel invented out of whole cloth.
Loki being a secret identity of an archangel to hide from his brothers is probably off limits to both Marvel and Gaiman as that's specific to Loki's portrayal in Supernatural.
Loki being a manifestation of chaos whose power is waning and running a con out of jail is specific to Gaiman. Although deities being manifestations of belief isn't exactly a stretch itself. But him leading a new pantheon of "New Gods" is novel. That specific characterization is off limits to Marvel.
But noticing that Loki and "Low Key" sound similar, that falls squarely in the realm of possible independent discovery.
Is Disney allowed to send a takedown request to every movie that says "that's not a moon" or "I am your father"? Did Disney file a trademark for the words "Low Key"?
I'm not on board with the implication that even talking about or referencing a copyrighted work is somehow an unprotected privilege, instead of fair use. To me this sounds a lot like the expansionist attitudes that the Olympics and sports teams have where they (incorrectly) assume anything adjacent to something they own is also theirs by law.
This is well within "lawyers will be paid a lot of money to argue the finer points" territory.
Which is a reference. The character in their comic is wearing a generic design; I would expect that it's not trademarked. It's also not an original design, Disney's use itself appears to be a reference to an earlier depiction of Loki by Neil Gaimain.
It's also not a matching product, it uses a different font and color than Loki's version (at least in the images I've seen, maybe there are others floating around).
But I'll follow your thread of logic. Disney owns the copyright on Superman, can they sue anyone who produces red capes?
> This is well within "lawyers will be paid a lot of money to argue the finer points" territory.
This doesn't mean much to me, almost everything except the most blatant fair-use issues seems to fall into this category nowadays. I have seen companies sue or threaten to sue over far more ridiculous claims.
"It's close enough to get lawyers involved" is a really weak argument when we're talking about copyright, especially where companies like Disney are concerned.
This "LOW KEY" shirt depicted here was worn by the Marvel character Loki in the very recent Marvel comic "Loki (2019) #2". This depiction of him was WILDLY popular, especially the second-printing variant cover by Babbs Tarr: https://twitter.com/babsdraws/status/1166461271396507648 & https://www.midtowncomics.com/product/1883000 which still goes for $20 or $30 on eBay, very uncommon for a modern second printing of anything.
This has nothing to do with the Norse mythology or Neil Gaiman's American Gods novel.
Far more likely, this is referring to a copyright violation as the shirt in question can be considered a derivative work. A quick google search of "low key loki" shows dozens of different works depicting the marvel character wearing that shirt.
Untrue, which is why, e.g., both ® and ™ symbols exist to designate trademarks.
> they obviously aren't going to be able to trademark Loki.
Apparently, the USPTO disagrees with you.
https://www.gerbenlaw.com/trademarks/entertainment/marvel/#8...
No, there's several Loki-related trademarks (both logos and word marks) on the page, but the link is actually specifically to a word mark for “Loki” by itself.
Are many of the users in this community still singing that song?
What I’m not clear on is whether anyone can do anything about it? Let’s take an even more absurd example, let’s say Disney was worried about Snow White merch, and they put the word “apple” on the list of words they would like Redbubble not to allow.
And let’s say they removed all my shirts with original paintings of heirloom apple varietals.
What recourse do I have? Disney asked Redbubble to do a thing and they did. But Redbubble has no legal responsibility to allow my shirts on their marketplace. I can contact their support and try to resolve it, but if they won’t then I need to find another partner.
Maybe on some grounds there is an anti-trust thing here since Disney controls so much of the merch space? But anti-trust cases are hard to win and even harder to find a DA who will take the case.
It’s a shitty situation, but any kind of real solution seems so far outside the realm of possibility it’s hard for me to get too excited about it.
I guess if there are enough “Disney is bad” articles floating around that maybe affects them negatively, or at least helps out some of their competitors in terms of hiring and viewership.
So, I’m glad this article and this thread appeared for that reason.