Who owns the rights to what?

[Oscarfan]

I doubt a big company like Disney would have only one copy of those documents.

 

[beaker]

So glad I still have all my nice Jim Henson Hour and Muppets Tonight VHS recordings from back in the day. Doubt they will ever get a dvd release. For shame. (the quality of the youtube uploads are attrocious)

 

[Muppetfan44]

Thanks for doing all of this work and research, Gelfingwaldo! I'm curious as to where you went to find all of this information, what was your sources? I'm just very curious about this academically and would love to hear about the process you went through to get this ownership information on so many different productions, some of which that you clearly point out, feature multiple character sets owned by different groups. The only thing I would add is that even is Disney owns specials like "A Celebration of 30 years"- they might still not be able to air it uncut- if there is a song or musical number that references a song that has a current copyright owned by someone else ( I don't think it does but just as an example)- they would have to get the rights to include that song in any version they would wish to sell or broadcast- that's why it took so long to release the Muppet Show DVDs that were released (all the legal battles over production numbers containing songs and all the copyrights that came with them).

I will say that I'm pretty sure whoever owns that book and posting that content online- that is probably illegal. I'm pretty sure that book was private Disney property and was not meant for public sale or consumption/release, meaning that it's proprietary Disney info and whoever has it and is posting pictures does not have the permission to do so. My advice to anyone on here is to not re-post any of that information on your own sites or use that information professionally without referencing the source of where it came from- sometimes people get into a lot of trouble with this type of stuff. The likelihood of that with this type of information is not a whole lot, but it's still a risk. I'm a lawyer and although this isn't a professional legal opinion it's an informed one, better safe than sorry