alt Hacker NewsWho owns Rudolph's nose?
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So if Santa knows who's been bad or good, he had to have known the other reindeer were mobbing Rudolph.
Yet he did nothing about it, right up until he needed Rudolph's capabilities to further his own strategic interests.
Holly-jolly? Right, right.
"Robert L. May died in 1976. But before he did, he established The Rudolph C ompany that holds the rights to Rudolph. Licenses are managed by a professional agency all to the benefit of Mr. May's children and grandchildren.
What makes this a holly-jolly Christmas story for me is knowing that the heirs of someone who would have been an unknown author are still benefiting from copyright protection, properly registered and renewed,"
I'm sorry but this is perverse. It's bad enough that we pretend ordinary property should be heritable, much less intangible knowledge.
Another illustration of how absurd current IP laws are. A company has exclusive rights to a character created 87 years ago by a guy who died 50 years ago.
This is actually the second time today I’ve seen a story on the copyright surrounding Rudolph. Weird.
> May told the publisher, Maxton Books for Little People, that he couldn’t agree to a publishing deal because he didn’t own the copyright in the story he had written.
> Apparently, that state of affairs didn’t sit well with those in charge at Montgomery Ward and the president of the company, Sewall Avery, gave May back the copyright in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. The book was published on October 4, 1947.
Seems hard to believe it was truly that simple, I wonder what additional nuance there might be to it.
Though I have no idea where I'd even begin to research that besides random web searches.