Last Week Tonight With John Oliver has been on a roll after Season 10 debuted from asking a local city company to create an advertisement for them to the new stunt he did on the recent Episode which just keeps getting funnier and makes the show worthwhile, you know other than the main stories.
John Oliver focussed on “Solitary Confinement” in the recent Episode which highlighted the country’s broken system and how we could begin to change this system with systematic planning like in North Dakota.
What followed is a short story about Intellectual Property Rights the showed us Winnie The Pooh’s new movie called “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” where we can see the iconic children’s storybook character turned into a serial killer. That is fun, isn’t it?? This happened because the original copyright on Winnie The Pooh had expired on Jan 2022 in the US making the iconic character freely available to use without paying any money or asking permission to the original creators.
What’s more important is another iconic character’s copyright is also going to expire next year i.e., 2024. And that is none other than Mickey Mouse.
The first ever picture of Mickey Mouse, also known as Steamboat Willie which we’ve seen quite a lot of times in Disney Movies where Mickey could be seen driving a boat whistling. Now, with that copyright going to expire next year, that specific character is going to be available for everyone to freely use and of course, John would take advantage of that and well, he did. Even though the copyright is going to expire next year, he introduced a new mascot in the show which is the original Steamboat Willie.
However, John argued that Disney will try with all their might to retain the copyright of the original Mickey Mouse but he wanted to see their arguments because he just disregarded on right on the show. If Disney makes an argument that the original Steamboat Willie has been on their logo for a long time and it holds a close significance to them, Last Week Tonight has also had the very same Mickey on their opening, and that pretty much counters Disney’s first argument. But he wanted to hear more of Disney’s arguments which is why he kept teasing them by introducing a mascot making Disney angrier by the second hoping for a lawsuit very soon.
Is he going to be sued by Disney? I guess we’ll know but the chances are pretty bright!
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