Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done

Re:Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done by superluserdo on Monday January 03, 2022 @06:24PM (#29788554)

>Disney doesn't own the rights to Pinocchio. You are free to make your own movie with book version of the the characters and the story.

This is very much an "in principle" thing. In practice, many of these traditional stories have (sadly) become synonymous with the Disney version, so Disney's work is basically the canonical version. This gives Disney a very good sword of Damocles to hang over the heads of anyone else trying to adapt these folk stories: to my understanding if you include a single copyrightable adaptation or embellishment of the original that was written by Disney without "prior art", you're liable to be steamrollered by the lawyer army and be ruined.

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Re:Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done by judge2020 on Monday January 03, 2022 @07:35PM (#29789273)

Pinocchio was just fine in the Shrek movies, and I imagine Eisner wasn't happy that Universal of all people used him (as, only a few years prior, Universal poached a bunch of imagineers and made The Lost Continent, which copied a lot of elements of 'Beastly Kingdom', the original name for Animal Kingdom), so it must have took a lot of lawyers saying "this is a bad idea" when Eisner surely suggested they sue over using Pinocchio.

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