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Does Hasbro still own the copyright on old gen characters?


EmeraldStar04

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It's rather complicated, unfortunately, as most of it isn't Copyright problems. It's Trademarks, which looks like the same thing, but isn't. For example Trademarks doesn't have a 'Fair Use' clause which is what catches a lot of people off-guard. And Trademarks have to be regularly renewed or they expire. A lot of the C&D's you see roaming around are on Trademark grounds, not Copyright. Copyright only covers written and visual works like books, pictures, and animations. Trademarks are applied to names and icons (meaning the way characters look... which means the toys). The third one of the triumvirate is Patents. Patents cover how things work, processes, and mechanical/chemical designs.

 

With regards to the original G1 shows 'My Little Pony and Friends' and 'My Little Pony Tales', Hasbro themselves didn't have the copyright on them, that was held by Sunbow productions which was a owned subsidiary of Marvel. Hasbro bought those copyrights back in 2009 as a side-deal with Disney when Disney bought Marvel. So at this time Hasbro has full 'Copyright' rights to all MLP.

 

As for the toys, and characters, which are *not* copyrightable, that's a matter of Trademarks. Way back when (sometime in the early 90's) Hasbro was divesting it's production of toys, shutting down most of it's own factories and shipping all their toy molds to off-shore manufactories in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc. This included all of the MLP range of G1 toys. In the mid-to-late 90's the G1 MLP toy sales were stagnant, and Hasbro did a redesign for G2 from the ground up. New characters, new style designs, new production methods. Because MLP sales in the States were *so* stagnant, they didn't bother even importing the G2 toys to the US, shipping them to South America, Europe, and so on. In any case, normally the way this would work is that Hasbro would insist that all the G1 molds be destroyed, or more rarely shipped back to Hasbro for archival storage. However, Hasbro at that time didn't see the point. The sales were bad. Why bother keeping the molds for a toy nobody's buying? And why pay to have the stuff destroyed when those same manufactories were willing to pay Hasbro for the molds because they still had a market in the East that Hasbro themselves couldn't break into due to China et al having fits about foreign companies selling stuff in their country. So Hasbro sold the molds to those off-shore manufactories, and also let their Trademarks on several of those characters expire because they weren't part of G2.

 

G3 comes around and Hasbro goes to Trademark their new line of toys... and discovers that someone else is maintaining Trademarks on small horse toys under the names of Firefly, Surprise, and a few other G1 characters, using the toy molds that they had sold as the basis of production. This continued and when G4 spun up with Lauren Faust, she got told several of the character names she wanted to use were unavailable because the Trademarks weren't held by Hasbro anymore. And to be honest, Hasbro didn't really care to go through the effort of trying to recover those Trademarks. It costs money to maintain each individual Trademark, and they were only a few missing, so why fuss about it?

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Thank you for such a wonderfully detailed explanation @Fhaolan. I didn't know the difference between the two either. *Is embarrassed*

 

However, they've gotten them back since retro merch has been popping up more and more over the years.

Edited by Leave a Whisper
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@@Fhaolan

 

That was an amazing explanation of how it all works. I'm curious as to how you know such information.

 

I'm old, people actually talk to me when I ask questions because they assume I'm an adult and would have a reason for asking. ;)

 

No, honestly it's because when I heard that Hasbro denied Lauren's original character name choices I spent some time digging to find out why out of curiosity, and you'd be surprised how much 'secret corporate' nonsense is actually public record because Hasbro *has* to publish stuff for their investors and stockholders. Getting a hold of it is tricky if you don't know how, but I have friends who are real-life stockbrokers and the like, so they know those tricks.

 

That and at one point I applied to Hasbro for a MLP production license for actual horse tack (bridles, harnesses, and the like). The idea fell through as I couldn't prove a market existed that was big enough to justify the licence fee and the base set-up fees from manufactories in India that I was talking to for actual production. Hand-making them myself was a non-starter. Yes, I can do leatherworking, I make my own horse's tack, but the prices I would need to charge to make a living off of it nobody would pay. In any case, during the discussions with Hasbro the whole bit about which characters were trademarked, and what exactly that would mean to me as a licensed MLP product maker was gone over.

 

Now, that's not to say nobody fibbed to me, or massaged the history a bit about the order all this came down in order to make themselves look better in the process, but I'm reasonably sure this is the way it came down give or take details. :)

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