Section 14

Russell Brown yesterday posted a piece on Disney’s attempt to acquire trademarks on, amongst other things, Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio.

Copyrights and trademarks are legitimate restrictions on speech; they protect the intellectual property of an idea’s originators without preventing the expression of any point of view. The value of a book or film doesn’t come from the physical labour required to create the medium but from the ideas embodied in the medium and the law is there to protect the value created.

The problem with Disney’s claim to Pinocchio and the rest is that Disney did not create Pinocchio. Disney created an adaptation of Pinocchio in 1940 but the original story was first published in 1883 by Carlo Collodi, that story itself based on older sources.

Disney is perfectly entitled to have protection for the intellectual property that they created but they cannot claim blanket rights over original sources.

Their application to the Intelletual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ) would give Disney exclusive use of all of these characters names on virtually any kind of merchandise. Giving these rights to Disney would not be protecting a value that they created but it would prevent others from telling or adapting stories that are rightly in the public domain.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 11:49 am and is filed under Copyright. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.