Disney Lawyers Chose Not To Sue You For Posting Your Disney World Vacation Videos... But They Could!
from the how-nice-of-them dept
In a world where so much that you see and hear on a daily basis is covered by copyright, it certainly makes it difficult to just film people walking around, like on a vacation, and post it to the internet. It becomes even more difficult when that vacation happens to be in a theme park, which is chock full of characters and content protected by copyright and trademark laws. Copycense points us to an attempt by the site WalletPop to find out the legality of posting your Disney vacation family videos to YouTube that results in nothing close to a reasonable answer. The short version is that Disney's lawyers basically have the option to sue, but realize it's probably a bad decision in most cases. But they certainly don't encourage it, and you could see circumstances under which they might actually sue.Of course, some will immediately claim that there's no real issue here, given that Disney has chosen not to sue. But just the very liability is a bit scary. What if you film too much of a ride? Or part of the ride has music or videos playing the background that might lead to legal threats? It certainly does create something of a chilling effect.
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Filed Under: copyright, home videos
Companies: disney
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Monorail accident
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So long as The Walt Disney Company can make money then it also stands to reason that the characters will never enter the public domain.
Money is always much more important than our shared culture.
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Re:
They would always look at me like I was the crazy one and then my boss would tell me do it because, hey, money is money.
I still have nightmares over making a decal of Calvin peeing on Hobbes.
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3D!
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Let them sue
So let them sue. I wonder what kind of settlement they would get from a family that just spent their vacation savings on the theme park. I don't think I can imagine a worse PR nightmare for Disney.
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Re: Let them sue
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Re: Re: Let them sue
ºoº
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Experience with other companies
Several other parents around us also decided to suddenly leave.
Word spread rather quickly, and in about 2 months, they shut their doors - permanently. I never heard what happened to that chain, but they obviously didn't learn that you have to tread softly in the land of copyright, fair use and parent's photo memories.
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Vacation as news broadcasts
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It's the camera!
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Oh come on...
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Re: Oh come on...
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Wouldn't surprise me
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No Issue at All
Like there's no real issue involved if someone holds a cocked and loaded gun to your head, as long as they don't pull the trigger.
Terrorists in suits are called "lawyers".
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Re: No Issue at All
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So where's the copy?
No one is going to "bootleg" your videos and consider them authentic Disney movies. Disney is losing no money by having these in public. AAMOF, they are getting a lot of free advertising from people showing the fun they are having.
If Disney truly has the ability to file lawsuits upholding copyright, that should be the last straw proving that copyright laws need to be fixed.
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Derivative works definition has to be narrowed significantly (and copyright duration shortened)
Authors doing the initial work perhaps deserve a break beyond merely the fame and opportunities they'd normally get without any monopoly at all, but deserving so are those a little less talented perhaps who excel at combining existing works. In fact, Disney is not ashamed to leverage existing ideas of others.
Anything can be called a "derivative work" if you are loose enough in meaning. [Everything is a derivative of many other things to some degree.] This broadness turns what most people think is copyright protections into something not too unlike patent protection where new works by others can be blocked based on semblances of existing works.
Really, while Disney rakes in the dough year after year on things they created ages ago, scores of talented people sit unable to legally modify such works or create new ones with similar themes and ideas. Not everyone has had the money to put together something from scratch that is as vast as what Disney can accomplish so as to compete with Disney.
Anyway, while we wait for copyright laws to be improved (eg, duration period shortened significantly and the derivative works definition narrowed significantly), artists can and should start leveraging open licenses like the CC share-alike licenses and even things like GPL if the project includes raw sources. By teaming up, they can combat the leverage and lead Disney has built and they can compete in terms of quality because many chip in on the same project.
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Who Wins?
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Response to: lrobbo on May 27th, 2012 @ 3:29pm
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