How Minions beat Disney at the copyright game

polygon.com:

If aliens ever discover our deserted planet at some point in the future, they may mistake the Minions for a hieroglyphic language our species once used to communicate. The babbling sidekicks from Despicable Me and its spinoffs can be seen on Facebook mental health pages, on Instagram posts announcing a baby was born, and on the sides of landscaping trucks. They’re on party supply store balloon displays, bakery chalkboards, QAnon protest signs, and cannabis-dispensary window murals, where they all look higher than usual. My roommate brought off-brand, vaguely yellow Minion shot glasses home from a trip to the Florida Keys. I do not need an article 20 years from now to warn me that drinking from them may be detrimental to my health — they’re clearly unlicensed merch.

Compare that ubiquity to how aggressively Disney handles its trademarked characters. In 1989, The Walt Disney Company brought the legal hammer down on three Florida day cares for their murals featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and other Disney characters. Disney demanded their removal. Nearly 10 years later, U.S. courts passed the Sonny Bono Act, an extension of various expiring copyrights, preventing them from becoming public domain. It was the first of its kind in America, and it’s colloquially known as “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act” due to its greatest benefactor — the company most known for fighting copyright expiration at any cost, and defending its brand regardless of public opinion.

Certainly that attitude has ruffled feathers. The day care injunctions were unpopular among Florida locals. Disney’s move was infamous enough to become the basis of a 2008 Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment where Krusty sandblasts unlicensed images of his face off