3:45AM Seth | The
LAT has a fascinating story today about Gregory S. Brown, a 51-year-old former Disney researcher who’s lived in the same one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood for the last 20 years. Brown had once tried and failed to take over Harvey Comics. In doing his research, he discovered an old
Ghostbusters lawsuit in which an overlooked copyright claim had allowed Fatso, Casper’s sidekick and a dead-ringer for the movie’s logo, to lapse into the public domain. Armed with his new knowledge of such loopholes, he returned to the Disney vaults to find similar cases. A failure to renew the copyright on the 1933 Mickey Mouse cartoon
The Mad Doctor led to a business selling knockoff cels from that film. Disney sued him, and won a $500,000 settlement. Now something of an early-animation copyright expert, Brown went back to the stacks to research his defense; it was then that he learned something truly astonishing: Thanks to some shoddy legalese, just about anyone could
move Disney’s cheese.
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