Saturday, October 17, 2009

I Ho.

Are Disney within their rights to object to "Ho White & the Seven Dwarfs"?

The article talks about potential copyright and licencing issues, but as long as the beer company isn't using aspects of the story that Disney created I don't see what they are doing wrong. Snow White was a traditional folk tale that Walt Disney took and made a feature film based on, but surely that doesn't give them the rights to all future interpretations of a story that they did not create.

6 comments:

JuliaM said...

You'd think not, but this IS America...

Ross said...

No it's Australia.

JuliaM said...

The advert is, yes.

But Disney's an American company. With American lawyers!

Ross said...

Yeah I can see why Disney would reach for their lawyers, but in order to be successful it would have to be Australian courts that uphold their action though.

Tim Almond said...

It's a cobblers story.

Disney don't seem to even be objecting at any level that I might consider to be an "objection" deserving of newspaper coverage (lawsuits, cease-and-desist, public condemnation). You can be sure they're not happy about it, but that's like me being unhappy about the rain falling on a beach holiday.

Ross said...

Ah, so they only mentioned the Disney angle in order to provide an excuse to run the story and there the newspapers (and I) have essentially just provided free publicity for the beer company,