JEFF BEER, Fast Company; Ryan Reynolds taunts Disney with ‘Winnie-the-Screwed’ ad as copyright battles heat up
Mint Mobile finds a way to make the copyrights of a 1926 classic children’s tale about your cellular bill.
"The new Mint Mobile ad is typical Reynolds ad fare, quickly and creatively tapping into a broader cultural conversation for one of his brands. That cultural conversation, however, is only going to get louder, especially for Disney. While it is symbolic that the original Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, is up for public domain two years from now, more pressing are the copyright issues facing key Marvel characters this year.
As reported last fall, multiple former Marvel creators and their estates are challenging Disney with ongoing copyright termination cases around characters like Thor, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Dr. Strange. These cases, which could go as high as the Supreme Court (as it almost did back in 2014, when the company reached a settlement with the estate of Jack Kirby), stem from the Copyright Revision Act of 1976, which provided an opportunity for authors or their heirs to regain ownership of a product after a given number of years."
