31 March 2010 by Techdirt - Mike Masnick
In a world where so much that you see and hear on a daily basis is covered by copyright, it certainly makes it difficult to just film people walking around, like on a vacation, and post it to the internet. It becomes even more difficult when that vacation happens to be in a theme park, which is chock full of characters and content protected by copyright and trademark laws. Copycense points us to an attempt by the site WalletPop to find out the legality of posting your Disney vacation family videos to YouTube and basically gets back nothing close to a reasonable answer. The short version is that Disney's lawyers basically have the option to sue, but realize it's probably a bad decision in most cases. But they certainly don't encourage it, and you could see circumstances under which they might actually sue.
Of course, some will immediately claim that there's no real issue here, given that Disney has chosen not to sue. But just the very liability is a bit scary. What if you film too much of a ride? Or part of the ride has music or videos playing the background that might lead to legal threats? It certainly does create something of a chilling effect.
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