Copyright Law Changing?

[Megotastrophe]

I see that some legislators are working to reduce copyright protection of characters from the current 95 years to the original term of 56 years. This would put a lot of my favorite characters into public domain.
Obviously Batman and Captain Kirk, CFtBL, all of these would be like Sherlock Holmes and Dracula and isabel bu anyone as a character with only certain stylistic looks being off limits.

[ODBJBG]

We've lived so long without this as a reality, it's hard to imagine it ever coming to pass. Pretty much since the invention of pop culture the companies have held onto and extended copyright laws so to protect their assets and profit machines. So we really have no idea what the world would look like with many of these characters in the public domain. Sure Dracula is free to use but we've never quite lived in a world where characters that are still super popular and mainstream would suddenly be free.

I'll be curious to see if it happens. Right now the only reason this is even coming up is a certain group of legislators want to punish a certain mouse for promoting gay rights and since that mouse has always had the most muscle in extending copyright laws, they feel this is a new way to attack them. That said, this effects far more media conglomerates than Disney, so I suspect they'll back down and this is just saber rattling.

[thunderbolt]

It would get every media company so I doubt it will amount to anything. WB, Toho, Disney Paramount Universal etc.

[MRP]

Even if copyright laws are modified and things go into the public domain, it will still be difficult to use them because trademark laws are still in place, and those do not have a time limit. Trademarks are separate from copyright and remain valid as long as the owner keeps them in use.

So let's say Batman goes into the public domain. The Bat symbol and the name Batman still are protected by trademark. Any public domain Batman product could not use the name Batman or the Bat symbol in its title or marketing. Or any of the other aspects of the Batman universe that have active trademarks on them. You could sell reprint old stories but not sell them with Batman in the title or market them as Batman stories. You could sell new pastiche but again, not with the Bat symbol on your covers and not with Batman in your title. And I believe most of the alternate phrases like Dark Knight, Caped Crusader etc. are also trademarked.

So yes, getting copyright laws back to original limits will be nice, but it will not create a free range bonanza to use those characters without limits. Dynamite Comics tried doing Tarzan and John Carter comics using them as they were in the public domain but while trademarks were still in effect. Calling the comics Lord of the Jungle and Warlord of Mars, and neither got much traction, and they faced constant cease and desist orders and lawsuits from the Burroughs estate on trademark violation grounds, not all of which were valid, but it did represent an escalating cost for making those books to the point where Dynamite just went and licensed the characters from the Burroughs estate because it was cheaper and less hassle than trying to continue to do so with the public domain window.

I think a lot of folks have an idealized concept of what will happen if their favorite characters go into the public domain, and a lot of it stems because people don't know the differences between copyright and trademark and just how restrictive trademarks are if they are valid and in use even on public domain property. Copyrights protect the actual created work. Trademarks protect everything the companies have used to make the work a commercial product (logos, titles, possibly costumes, etc.) and never expire unless they are not used. It makes using public domain characters hard to use still unless all associated trademarks have been abandoned by the previous owners (and that only happens when a character or property has been uncommercial for an extended period of time like some of the golden age super-heroes used in Project Super Powers). It's still possible to do it, but it's a lot more complicated and restrictive than a lot of people realize.


-M

[ODBJBG]

Absolutely and again we've never really navigated waters like this where a lot of popular characters would go into public domain.

A perfect example is Winnie the Pooh, which recently when into public domain. Or at least Milne’s 1926 book is now in the public domain, but that character is named Winnie-the-Pooh, not all of the other characters are in it and as of yet, pretty much no one has actually used it. There were a couple of cited examples, the most prominent being a Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile commercial that barely mentioned Pooh himself and instead was more of a parody of the entire thing with Winnie-The-Screwed. And that "Pooh Horror Movie" that made all the internet buzz for a day or two, which was not even a real movie, but some cheap fan film thing that's not even finished and probably won't see distribution. It's not a real movie that suddenly hit theaters because Pooh is in public domain.