Flat Stanley Learns How Ownership Of Infinite Goods Hurts Everyone

from the sounds-like-a-good-children's-book dept

Reader John Lownie writes in with yet another example of legal battles gone mad over trademark and copyright, involving a teacher doing some creative things with a character in a book and the estate of an author fighting over who owns the "rights" to a fictional character named Flat Stanley. The details here are a bit nuanced, and while my initial reaction was to favor the teacher over the author's estate (which the article's author clearly does as well), there's one little tidbit that's totally glossed over in the article that suggests this is mostly the teacher's fault.

Here are the details:

1. Jeff Brown, an author, wrote a series of childrens' books about a character named Stanley Lambchop in the 1960s.
2. In 1964, one of the books in the series, called Flat Stanley involves Stanley being "flattened," and living the life of someone as flat as a sheet of paper.
3. In 1995, Dale Hubert, a 3rd grade teacher, found a copy of the book Flat Stanley which was "obscure and nearly out of print."
4. Inspired by a single page in the book where Stanley mails himself to a friend's place in California, Hubert begins having his students create and decorate their own Flat Stanley cutouts, and send them to friends or relatives who live far away, asking the recipients to take photos with the cutout, and "send him back with a letter describing Stanley's adventures."
5. Hubert sets up a website tracking the results, which starts to bring in tons of attention (along with Stanley showing up with famous people and in famous places).
6. Brown, the author, is thrilled about this, and visits with Hubert and his family.
7. In 2002, Brown writes another book: Stanley Flat Again
8. In 2003, Brown dies.
9. Somewhere around 2006 Brown's estate sells the rights to Flat Stanley to a group that makes a musical around the now popular character. The estate also sells the rights to Universal to make a Flat Stanley movie.
10. In 2006 Hubert -- the teacher, not the author -- (on the advice of his lawyer) files for a trademark on Flat Stanley
11. Which brings us to today, where Brown's estate is protesting the trademark application and wants to take control of the FlatStanley.com website to sell merchandise associated with the musical/movie (though they have no problem with Hubert continuing the project using the FlatStanleyProject.com domain name)

Now, the article, written mostly from Hubert's perspective points out (accurately) that without Hubert's involvement, Flat Stanley would most likely have been lost to history. Brown never would have come out with another book, and there would have been no musical or movie. And, clearly, the whole Flat Stanley project is very cool and fun for kids, and a great teaching device, for which Hubert deserves plenty of credit. But what the story totally glosses over is point number 10 up there, which I've put in bold. Hubert filed for a trademark on the character which he had no rights over. This was bad advice from his lawyer, but is common these days when people seem to think it's somehow natural to "own" ideas.

Because of this false belief in "ownership" a problem is created where there was none before. Hubert and Brown had no problems when both were merely using the character. In fact, it helped both of them greatly. But as soon as Hubert exerted ownership rights, then Brown's estate had every right to call foul. Of course, Brown's family is also guilty of exerting ownership rights, when much of the value of that ownership was created by Hubert. So the problem here isn't Brown's estate being a big bad bully -- but that both sides have bought into the ridiculous idea that one can "own" a character like this. Everything was working just fine, and everyone was benefiting when there was no ownership issue.

That's what's nice about an infinite good -- everyone can use it, and there's no loss to anyone. Once you exert ownership rights, you add in artificial scarcity, and suddenly suddenly one person's gain is another's loss. And, as a result, we're all worse off.

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