![]() Madison, associate dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. “Law and equity might line up on the side of forfeiture,” said Michael J. And the cost of what has been an academic exercise would soar if moved into a federal courtroom. No one expects Disney, which declined interview requests, to surrender Mickey without an all-out legal brawl. Roger Schechter, a George Washington University expert on copyright, called the article’s argument “a plausible, solid, careful case.” By contrast, a Disney lawyer once threatened the author with legal action for “slander of title” under California law. It produced one little-noticed law review article: a 23-page essay in a 2003 University of Virginia legal journal that argued “there are no grounds in copyright law for protecting” the Mickey of those early films. The issue has been chewed over by law students as class projects and debated by professors. That’s a foregone conclusion,” said copyright scholar Peter Jaszi of American University’s Washington College of Law after studying the issue at The Times’ request. “That ‘Steamboat Willie’ is in the public domain is easy. Yet elsewhere, especially in academia, the idea has attracted surprising support. The notion that any Mickey Mouse might be free of copyright restrictions is about as welcome in the Magic Kingdom as a hag with a poisoned apple. Original Mickey, the star of the first synchronized sound cartoon, “Steamboat Willie,” and other early classics, had longer arms, smaller ears and a more pointy nose. And the potentially free Mickey is not the most current or familiar version of the famous mouse.Ĭopyright questions apply to an older incarnation, a rendition of Mickey still recognizable but slightly different. ![]() For the record, any knock-offs would have to make clear that they did not come from Disney, or else risk violating the separate laws that protect trademarks.
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