Recently I read a posting on Tech Cruch about Murakami going after forums for using copywritten material without a license. Isn’ it ironic how the company that was lobbying for the Mickey Mouse Protection Act to extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years doesn’t bother to police their trademarks/copywritten characters/images in the internet coloring book realm?
Just take a quick look at some of these searches via Google Images:
We are talking about hundreds of thousands of Disney copy written images that are on thousands of sites – look at results for each of the terms above 50,000+. The interesting thing is that in many cases these images have been on these sites for years which shows that Disney doesn’t appear to be doing anything to protecting their copyrights with these violators. Some of these coloring sites are making thousands of dollars as a result of ad revenue related to the Disney coloring images. So they are in essences monetizing the copwritten pictures and are not doing any sort of revenue share with Disney.
Some of the largest sites that are blatantly using Disney trademark/copywritten images without permission include:
While the # of site are countless these are the ones that appear to be generating the most traffic from search engines by leveraging the Disney intellectual property. I really like the ones like Disney Clips where they are using the trademark Disney in their Domain and then have the Disney images on there as well. Thousand of coloring book sites will continue to exploit the equity that Disney has built up by using the trademarks/copywritten material as a means of getting natural search traffic and monetizing that traffic with ads. As long as these sites continue to leverage and give away Disney IP for free to their users – they will continue to profit.
Tags: DIS, disney, disney co, Disney Copywright Protection, Disney IP, Disney Tradmarks, Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mouse Protection Act, walt disney
