US Ninth Circuit affirms that The Moodsters characters are ineligible for copyright protection
Thomas Key · Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice · 2020
Denise Daniels v The Walt Disney Company, 958 F 3d 767 (9th Cir 2020) The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently affirmed that The Moodsters characters are ineligible for copyright protection given that they are not sufficiently expressive. US copyright law does not protect the name or the general idea for a character. When a character consists of sufficiently original authorship, however, the particular expression of a character in a registered work may be protected by copyright. Courts within the Ninth Circuit have extended protection to characters that constitute the ‘story being told’ in a work, rather than ‘mere chessman in the game of telling the story’ since 1954 (Warner Bros Pictures v...