A confession, and some thoughts on copyright law.

[queen_of_kithia]

You may have noticed that lately my "Year of Bert & Ernie" project has become more of an Ernie-and-Cookie-Monster project, and I must confess that that was entirely by design. There is a precedent of Bert-and-Ernie material being misinterpreted in the context of Pride Week, and while I try to respect everyone's right to an individual

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[queen_of_kithia]

I know you've explained this before, but I know the Muppets' copyright is now owned by Disney. That doesn't include the Sesame characters? What about characters that appear on both, like Kermit?

It gets really confusing, and I'm probably not the best at explaining it but ... In a nutshell, Disney owns the characters from The Muppet Show and the subsequent movies. Sesame Workshop owns the Muppet characters created specifically for Sesame Street. Kermit is really the only one who had a significant presence on both shows, and since he's now owned by Disney, the Workshop can't make new Sesame Street material with Kermit anymore, although they can still show vintage Sesame Street material featuring Kermit, who shows up a lot in the Sesame Street Old School DVD collections. In the first three Muppet movies, the Sesame Street characters make cameos, and I don't know if Sesame Workshop gets a cut of the royalties from those movies or not, but my guess would be not. Sesame Workshop is still allowed to use the word "Muppet" to describe its puppet characters but, since the word "Muppet" is now a trademark owned by Disney, all Sesame Street merchandise has to have a little fine-print disclaimer somewhere stating that the word "Muppet" is a trademark of the Muppet Holding Company, LLC (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company).

With all finally said and done, Jim Henson got what he wanted, which was for the Sesame Street characters to belong to Sesame Workshop after he died, and for the Muppet Show characters to belong to Disney. Unfortunately, it took a long, bitter, contentious struggle to get to that point. Thus far, the best source I've found to read about that struggle is the book Street Gang by Michael Davis. There's also an online series of articles, by an author named Jim Hill, that tells the story largely from the Disney perspective. Those articles have a lot of interesting information but they're written in a casual, nonscholarly style, and Hill's assertions are nearly impossible to verify (and also the series was written in 2001, so some of the information is out of date). His account differs in some major points from the version presented in Street Gang, and where there are discrepancies, I tend to favor Davis over Hill, simply because Davis made the effort to cite his sources. Anyway, the most pertinent article in the Hill series can be found here.

There's also a biography of Jim Henson due to be published in September of this year, which I imagine will cover the story in detail as well.

[bluealoe]

Thanks for the explanation. :)

[queen_of_kithia]

You're welcome. :) There's one more point that I forgot to make: Hill doesn't seem to be aware of it, but Davis reports that Michael Eisner wanted the rights to the Sesame Street characters as part of the original attempted Disney/Henson merger back in 1989-1990, but Jim Henson put his foot down and said it was out of the question. Both Hill and Davis agree that the status of the Sesame Street characters was the final straw that caused the deal to fall apart after Henson's death (although they disagree over who pulled out first), but Davis argues that it was a sticking point that slowed down the deal considerably even while Henson was still alive.