A ridiculous person named Vincent Peters sued Kanye West in 2010, alleging West had stolen a song Peters had sent the rapper in 2006. The overlap in question came in the chorus of Kanye West's "Stronger," which starts, "N-n-now that that don't kill me / Can only make me stronger."
The LAT has a fascinating story today about Gregory S. Brown, a 51-year-old former Disney researcher who's lived in the same one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood for the last 20 years. Brown had once tried and failed to take over Harvey Comics. In doing his research, he discovered an old Ghostbusters lawsuit in which an overlooked copyright claim had allowed Fatso, Casper's sidekick and a dead-ringer for the movie's logo, to lapse into the public domain. Armed with his new knowledge of such loopholes, he returned to the Disney vaults to find similar cases. A failure to renew the copyright on the 1933 Mickey Mouse cartoon The Mad Doctor led to a business selling knockoff cels from that film. Disney sued him, and won a $500,000 settlement. Now something of an early-animation copyright expert, Brown went back to the stacks to research his defense; it was then that he learned something truly astonishing: Thanks to some shoddy legalese, just about anyone could move Disney's cheese.
