Post by drakeborough on Jan 15, 2017 20:38:28 GMT
In the topic of the Papersera Forum dedicated to DuckTales, back in 2011 a user claimed that at the time the tv series aired there was a litigation for ownership of some characters between Barks and Disney, with Disney losing the lawsuit because of an unauthorized used of characters. The sentence supposedly certified that Scrooge and other characters were created by Barks for the editor who had the licence to publish comics (Western), but Western was not a direct emanation of Disney and so the characters created for Western couldn't be freely used by Disney. Western needed Disney's permission to print Donald Duck's stories, since he was created by Disney in animation, but Scrooge and the others were created for Western comic books and were supposedly not part of the Disney licence. At this point, Disney supposedly had a private agreement with Barks and paid him a big sum of money to buy the rights to the characters without making the deal widely known. It is said Barks didn't care about the lawsuit, and the litigation was started by two fans who also took advantage of the fact that some episodes were adaptations of Barks stories; this may explain why the later episodes contain less Barks adaptations.
The user who made these claims was asked for a source, and he said he was told these things by Disney comic author Carlo Chendi in private conversations.
Has anyone heard anything about this issue? I never heard of it before, and the idea that Scrooge may not have been a character owned by Disney for its first 40 years of existence goes against everything I know about how the copyright of these characters works.