26Arm Wrestling Match
Instead of going to court over a copyright infringement dispute, the CEOs of Southwest Airlines and Stevens Aviation challenged each other to an arm wrestling duel via humorous letters. No lawyers were ever involved, and the men honored the outcome of the match.
27. A map-making company in the 1930s placed a made-up hamlet named Agloe (New York) in their maps as a copyright trap. Years later the village started showing up on Rand McNally maps. When the originator of the map sued for copyright infringement, he found out that locals and the government had adopted and used the fictitious name.
28. Universal Studios, Inc. sued Sony and its distributors in 1976, alleging that because Sony was manufacturing a device (Betamax) that could be used for copyright infringement, they were thus liable for any infringement committed by its purchasers, essentially trying to kill videotape recording.
29. In 2011, a crested black macaque pressed a trigger on a wildlife photographer’s camera, set up in a jungle for that specific purpose. This incident set off an unusual debate about copyright. In 2016, a federal judge ruled that a monkey cannot own the copyright to the images.
30. The 1964 ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' TV special is in a grey area of copyright due to the fact that the studio mistakenly spelled out the copyright date as 1164 in roman numerals and hasn’t corrected it since.
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31It’s a Small World
“It’s a Small World” song, which is frequently played at its headline attraction at Disney theme parks is the only Disney song not copyrighted due to the request by UNICEF. The song was played at the 1964 NYC World’s Fair as a salute to UNICEF and is seen as a gift to children around the world.
32. Musopen is a non-profit organization that provides high-quality recordings of classical music in the public domain so that anyone can use them. The project emerged as a response to the big corporations in the music industry that were burying old artists, like Beethoven and Chopin, behind copyright.
33. As copyrights cannot be infinite, Jack Valenti of the MPAA wanted copyrights extended to “forever less a day.”
34. A Fantastic Four film was created in 1994 solely to secure copyright to the property. The producers never intended it for release, although the director, actors, and other participants were not informed of this fact.
35. Due to a mishap by the distributor, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” had no copyright protection and instantly fell into the public domain.
36Greg Ham
Greg Ham, the flautist and founding member of the band ‘Men at Work’, died of an overdose following a bout of depression sustained from losing a plagiarism lawsuit from copyright trolls. His crime was using part of the children’s nursery rhyme “Kookaburra” on his solo in the song “Down Under.”
37. Under the US Copyright Office “supernatural beings” cannot hold copyrights so technically if there are real vampires or werewolves out there, they can’t claim royalties for their original content.
38. Bram Stoker’s widow won a copyright lawsuit against the makers of the German classic film “Nosferatu.” Though the courts ordered all copies of the film burned, one survived hidden and was copied and disseminated, making “Nosferatu” the first cult movie.
39. Disney once prevented a stonemason from engraving ‘Winnie the Pooh’ on a young girl’s gravestone because it would violate Disney’s copyright.
40. As soon as you create something, it is automatically protected under copyright in Australia. You don’t have to register for copyright protection.
