Quote:
Originally Posted by Zane
I'm curious, how do either Disney or the ERB estate have any say as long as you limit the source material to that which is in the public domain? About half of the John Carter books are in the public domain in the US, as are several of the Tarzan books.
Zane
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I'm not a lawyer, and could be very well misinformed about this, but this is my understanding of the situation:
While much of what ERB wrote is in the public domain, the characters themselves (John Carter, Tarzan, etc.) have been trademarked.
This has the unfortunate side effect that any use of them outside of simply printing the public domain manuscripts represents a threat to the trademark. Which, I understand, the ERB Estate and Disney will defend vigorously.
The situation extremely similar with REH's Conan and Frank Baum's Oz. Republishing the manuscripts in the PD is allowed, but further utilization of the IP is not really an option.
I gather that Adamant Entertainment had many issues with their
Mars game, which had art that (to my eyes) looked extremely similar to ERB's Martians and caused them some legal issues before release.