Intellectual Property Issues

ellWith the Disney purchase of Marvel, I’ve gotten back to thinking about intellectual property and ownership. Disney is the champ of protecting their IP seemingly in perpetuity which is frightening enough, but now they own the rights to characters that were created by others, and have a substantial existing fan base. As is often pointed out to me, many of these characters are well developed and multi faceted, not necessarily falling into categories of absolute good or evil. This is what makes the characters and brings the Marvel universe to life. In Disney’s attempt to woo male teen viewers, how much of this will have to change? Will their target demographic be interested in conflicted characters, or is all they are looking for mutants involved in cool action scenes? This leads me to my real question about this deal’s relation to IP.

Disney now owns the rights to all of these characters and can do with them what it sees fit, but there is a huge community that will be upset if the characters are changed to suit Disney’s ends. The characters will be changed forever. The ability to use them to tell stories in their traditional sense will be gone because Disney controls all the rights. In the end, they may very well destroy something which is dear to many people.
This leads me to a bit of a rethink of how IP like this should be dealt with. A case should be made that if a subsequent owner of a creative IP modifies it substantially from the original source material, the classic interpretation should be up for grabs. If characters are altered so much that they are only a shadow of their former selves, their classic personalities should be opened up to the public domain. I do realize this would be a bonanza for IP lawyers, and would likely bog down many a production in lengthy legal proceedings, but there needs to be a way to protect the origins of IP that people still hold dear from a corporatization that I fear Disney will bring.

I don’t want good stories and multidimensional characters locked away in the Disney vault simply because it doesn’t suit their ends to let them out, or flesh them out as they should. Come to think of it, if now new product has come from an IP in say 10 years…maybe even 5, it should automatically be placed in the public domain. All this would take a radical reversal from the way IP laws are headed today, but in the age of the internet, global collaboration, and mash ups of genres and form, it is probably the way the world is headed. I can already hear the lawyers rubbing their hands.