Disney plans to sue anyone who Digitally Replaces 'Little Mermaid' With Mayo Actress

From the moment Disney announced that Halle Bailey would star in a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, racists have bitterly complained that a Black girl might play a fictional magic fish person on film. Because of course they have.

There are good reasons to be mad at this film, another in a series of unnecessary and by definition unoriginal remakes, about the virtues of a woman giving up her family and the very core of her being in order to land a man.

But casting isn’t one of them.

Alas, they wanna be where the white people are, and they’ve found an answer to their woes.

Multiple folks on Twitter immediately focused on the poster boiling down “woke” to just be a synonym for “Black,” a rare moment of pure honesty about what these folks really mean when they complain about it.

Sadly, my brain is permanently fried by years of legal practice so my takeaway was this:

You know, the lawyers who so zealously guard the company’s intellectual property they pretty much single-handedly broke the whole copyright regime to suit their own interests and who historically run to court against companies marketing altered versions of their films? Those folks.

You want thingamabobs? They’ve got 20! And in this sentence thingamabobs are causes of action for copyright and trademark infringement.

Even these live action remakes that no one asked for seem like a Hail Mary legal play to set up some backdoor claim that the substantially similar scripts used in the NEW movie — which gets a new copyright — might give them some limited leverage against future creators trying to work with the original story when it enters the public domain. It’s hard to shake the feeling that this is all part of a far-flung future brief that says, “We grant that Dumbo the 1941 film is public domain… but when the defendant’s work features this scene it is actually infringing our 2019 version of Dumbo.” This shouldn’t work and would make a mockery of the whole purpose behind keeping copyright protection limited, but… can’t fault them if they try.

Anyway, by all means try to sell a digitally altered version of a Disney movie and see what happens! They may just send Chip & Dale after overseas pirates, but trying to take the exact same movie, edit it for the benefit of the most insecure bigots on the planet, and then sell it back?

Disney will undoubtedly be watching the boards and waiting to bring the real legal firepower for that one.