Walt! Say it Ain't So! Mickey was a Knockoff??

"Micky Mouse vs Mickey Mouse" raises the possibility that Mickey Mouse was copied from a mouse toy made by the Performo-Toy Company (I hadn't heard of them,either), called - Mickey.

There are a lot of coincidences, but I think there's at least a 50-50 chance that Walt Disney at least thought he had come up with "Mickey" on his own. He may have seen the PTC Mickey, and retained an unconscious memory - or Walt's Mickey may look like PTC's Mickey because both are highly anthropomorphised and abstracted mice, designed by people in the same culture at the same time.

Sadly .... no, I'll let you read it.

(However, before getting boiling mad about Disneyco over this, remember the flap over the Nebraska ETV Network's logo, which they paid a commercial artist to create. Then, in 1975, NBC trotted out a new logo that exactly the same as the Nebraska ETV logo. The last I heard of it, Nebraska ETV was about to be squashed by NBC's legal department.

Happily, NBC decided to pay ETV's expenses for creating and distributing a new logo, and threw in some new equipment.)

"All the Myriad Ways" - Tribute or Violation?

"All The Myriad Ways" is both a moderately typo-free copy of Larry Niven's short story, and, as far as I can tell, a violation of intellectual property rights. The short story was published first in 1971, in a collection of short stories of the same name. The collection is out of print, but currently available at Amazon.com, in the Del Rey 1985 edition.

The person who copied Mr. Niven's story was good enough to retain the original title, and give Larry Niven credit as author. It would have been more of a tribute, if the copier had proofed the story and fixed the typos.

A somewhat more respectful (at least) website devoted to Larry Niven's work is "Known Space: The Future Worlds of Larry Niven."

(What follows is a sort of mini-rant. Feel free to ignore it.)

I'll admit I'm biased. I like copyright, patents, and residuals. The latter is something that I may be more concerned about than some actors. Ray Bolger, American entertainer, supposedly said, when asked if he had gotten any residuals from his role as Scarecrow in the 1939 "Wizard of Oz," "No, just immortality. I'll settle for that."

I see his point.

As if to demonstrate an inverse relationship between scholarship and eloquence, a learned judge laid this syntactic egg. The judge in question is Alex Kozinski, U.S. 9th Circuit Judge, with whom Circuit Judges O'Scannlain and Kleinfeld join, in not agreeing with the decision in the case of "VANNA WHITE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS AMERICA, INC."

"Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture." (from The Unofficial Judge Alex Kozinski Site.)

I wish the judge had been a better writer. He's actually got a point, relevant to the apparently nut-house case that came before the bar, involving Vana White and a robot that she claimed had taken her identity.

You can't make this stuff up.

Even though a brilliant actor/singer/dancer decided that a sort of immortality was a fair trade-off for no residuals, and Vanna White got a review of her strange claim, I think that intellectual property rights are important.

I wouldn't go as far as some, insisting on approval and payment for use of terms like "Coca Cola ®," "Superman ®," and "Kleenex ®," providing that the terms were acknowledged to be registered trademarks.

But I would like to see authors, and their estates, get the income they deserve for creating works like "The Lord of the Rings," "Ulysses," and "Love Story."

Related posts on Apathetic Lemming of the North:

• "All the Myriad Ways" - Tribute or Violation?
  (September 4, 2007)
• Stealing Intellectual Property Isn't Nice
  (August 29, 2007)
• Mis-Matched and Unattributed: Double Whammy for These Blog Posts
  (August 26, 2007)
• Intellectual Property Rights: A Borderline Post?
  (August 22, 2007)
• Intellectual Property Violation: What to Do
  (August 15, 2007)
• Intellectual Property Violation: This Time With Laughs
  (August 10, 2007)
• Copyright Material Ripped Off? You're not alone.
  (August 9, 2007)
• Plagiarism-Finder Site: Copyscape
  (August 9, 2007)
• Another Abuse of Copyright: If This Isn't Illegal, it Should Be!
  (August 9, 2007)
• Copyright: a List You Shouldn't Myth
  (August 8, 2007)
• Copy, Steal, Rob, Whatever: Another Violation of Intellectual Property Rights
  (August 3, 2007)
• Copyright Infringement, YouTube, and Video Sharing
  (July 28, 2007)
• Sploggers: Intellectual Property Thieves
  (July 28, 2007)