This is from an article on Mickey Mouse that was linked to in the original Sherlock Holmes article:
Here is where it gets tricky: Disney also holds trademarks on its characters, including the “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey Mouse, and trademarks never expire as long as companies keep submitting the proper paperwork. A copyright covers a specific creation (unauthorized copying), but trademarks are designed to protect against consumer confusion — to provide consumers assurance about the source and quality of a creation.
Boiled down, any public domain use of the original Mickey cannot be perceived as coming from Disney, Ms. Ginsburg explained.
Out of curiosity, how clear does it need to be presented to the viewer that this is not a Disney production? Does it need to be written out at the beginning "The characters depicted here are entirely fictional and are not from the Disney corporation"? Or can it be at the end credits? Is it sufficient to expect that a viewer seeing the Warner Brothers animation and music at the beginning would know it's not Disney, or does it require more?
Yes (assuming no further bullshit from Disney), in 2024 you would be legally allowed to sell a verbatim copy of the original Steamboat Willie animation, including any bits where it says "this animation was made by Disney" (because that's just factually true). But if you remixed Steamboat Willie into something different, you wouldn't be legally allowed to even remotely suggest that your remix was made by Disney.
My prompt was the following (I'm unclear how much it helps to include a URL): "Explain Digital Mobile Radio in simple sentences. You can use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_mobile_radio as a reference."
Its response:
Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) is a type of digital radio technology that is used for two-way radio communications. It allows for the transmission of voice and data over a radio signal using digital techniques. DMR is used in professional mobile radio and amateur radio applications, and it offers improved audio quality, better resistance to interference, and enhanced features compared to analog radio systems. DMR networks are typically set up by professional organizations, such as businesses, government agencies, and public safety organizations, to provide communication services for their employees or members.
I also asked it to rewrite the pasted opening paragraphs from the Wikipedia page "in simple terms so that someone who isn't well-versed in the subject can understand what it is" and it responded with this:
Digital mobile radio (DMR) is a type of radio technology used for commercial products. It is defined by a standard created by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, and is designed to be low-cost and easy to use. It is used in competition with similar technologies like P25 phase II and NXDN. DMR has three different tiers, and was first published in 2005. The main goal of the technology is to allow radio communications to be used across different brands without being limited to one specific brand.
It reminds me how theoretically, professional pitchers and professional batters both train so hard that their skill levels end up cancelling out. The number of hits and strikes should average out to around the same as an amateur matchup.
This is far from guaranteed, though: it's a nice quirk of baseball regulations that pitcher skill and batting skill can both be trained to provide about the same improvement over amateurs.
In other sports this doesn't hold in the same way: e.g. amateur soccer games tend to be higher scoring than at the professional level, because defence improves more with training than attacking does.
That said, fields where adversarial generative methods are useful have an inbuilt damping effect where gains on one side tend to cancel out gains on the other.
Here is where it gets tricky: Disney also holds trademarks on its characters, including the “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey Mouse, and trademarks never expire as long as companies keep submitting the proper paperwork. A copyright covers a specific creation (unauthorized copying), but trademarks are designed to protect against consumer confusion — to provide consumers assurance about the source and quality of a creation.
Boiled down, any public domain use of the original Mickey cannot be perceived as coming from Disney, Ms. Ginsburg explained.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20221227170631/https://www.nytim...