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Disney Cares About Copyright Holders...
Posted by Steven Wu on Tuesday, February 04 @ 16:27:59 EST Copyright
...Or so you would think, from their support of the Copyright Term Extension Act. Of course, it's hard to reconcile this view with how hard Disney has been fighting to avoid paying royalties to the heirs of the estate of A. A. Milne--better known as the creator of Winnie the Pooh. According to this article in the LA Times (reg. req'd):
"Walt Disney Co. on Monday asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit seeking more than $200 million in royalties for Winnie the Pooh merchandise, charging that the heirs to the fortune have been concealing documents that were stolen from Disney."
The heirs claim that they found the documents in dumpsters on the edge of Disney's property.

Disney in fact owns most of the copyrights to Winnie the Pooh. But it only has those copyrights today because it negotiated some deals with the original copyright holders. How sad that Disney is trying so hard to avoid respecting those deals, even though they were based on a strong notion of legitimate copyright ownership that Disney (among others) has repeatedly endorsed and recently extended.

 
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Related Links
· their support of the Copyright Term Extension Act
· A. A. Milne
· Winnie the Pooh
· this article in the LA Times
· More about Copyright
· News by Steven Wu


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Re: Disney Cares About Copyright Holders... (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Friday, February 07 @ 22:15:08 EST
Quote: "The heirs claim that they found the documents in dumpsters on the edge of Disney's property." Much as I dislike the Disney Borg-o-lith This just doesn't pass the smell test.
I worked as a consultant in Disney's Orlando area HQ building for over a year. The building is called the "Team Disney building," and very little paper ever gets out because most of the staff paper discards go first to a commercial shredding facility then into the recycled material stream. Someone could raid the recycle bins on the loading dock before the shredding firm makes the pick-up, but doing so would be at the least trespassing in an area clearly marked as off limits to guests. Even this would be quite hard to do as the same loading dock is the "smoking area" for the Disney cast members who still have not kicked the habit. Lots of foot traffic, and TV cameras.

Much more likely: An insider has been feeding them documents because he/she knows how Disney's lawyers never met a penny they wouldn't try to steal. It could be almost anyone, as many internal Disney documents are poorly controlled. Cast members and consultants, (those with access into Disney's internal corp. servers,) are often amazed at what is not password protected when they start browsing shared directories across the internal networks.
Even protected documents are often open for "read-only" viewing and/or printing. In many ways Disney's network security is a classic example of the "hard shell, soft chewy inside" model. The firewalls to the internet are hard, the internal controls for cast members pretty easy to bypass.


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