Intellectual Property of fairy tales

#1 Maybe to no one, as I know literature "products" became own by the whole world after 80 years of autors death. Check it in the local library, they must know.

#2 I know that Alice in wonderland, and robin hood are in what is called "The public Domain". This is where as Viktor describes.
I think though, it is always inyour own interest if you plann to use fairytails etc etc, that you must check with your local Interlectual Property Registrar. In the UK it is the Copyright and Patent Office (i think).

#3 The vast majority of folk and fairy-tales are public domain but particular renditions are may not be. In reference to Disney films Cinderella, Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wondeland, Peter Pan (novel), Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid (novel/short story Hans Christian Anderson), Robin Hood are not theirs. Their particular versions, however, are.

I find it particularly frightening how many people aren't aware of this. I guess that shows the power of corporate media marketing and how they affect (adversely) the literacy of a culture. My wife is a children's librarian and this is a big problem for her as people often come in looking for books like "The Little Mermaid", she gives it to them, and they come back fuming that they were given a book they consider "inappropriate" for children. Its particulalry sad since they were appropriate until very recently.

I think that old folk and fairy-tales are a great place to mine game ideas. Some things to keep in mind as you look for them.

*Avoid popularized versions.
*When checking for copyrights looks for title variants. There's a difference between "Dracula" and "Bram Stoker's Dracula". Movies do odd name things like this all the time to differentiate their version.
*Look for the old Dover books collections. These were great especially because they weren't cleaned up like the Disney (or any other producer of children's media) versions. The colored fairy books are especially good ("The Red Book, Green Book, Brown book, et. al.)
*If you can track down an older copy of Grimm's get it. If you can't look for a book called Grimm's Grimmest. The important thing to realize about these old tales is that what we call fairy tales were actually the urban legends of the day. Many of them were meant to scare and titilate. They were not the children's (and I use that term loosley) stories we know today. They were told amongst mixed audiences and are often quite unsettling. Track down a story called "Mr Fox" and you'll find a serial killer tale. Yikes.
*You don't have to (nor should you) try to replicate Disney and it's peers. One of the reasons I reccomend looking for older versions. There are so many ways to take the info in those tales, it's a shame that people are so conditioned to think the Disney way.
*Look for stories no one has done in a game or movie. Don't do Snow white or Beauty and the Beast when there great stories like "East of the Sun, West of the Moon."
*Don't limit yourself to Euro tales. There is a whole wolrd out there and prior to the advent of things like copyrights people use to share tales and change them from teller to teller, audience to audience. There are so many versions with different cultural flairs that it's not funny.

That's my $0.02. Hope it was useful

#4 Thijs,
A majority of Disney's movie ideas are public domain or lifted from other sources. Obviously the look and feel of the disney characters belong to disney, so you can't use those.

The list of fairy tale characters that you CAN use is considerably longer than the list of characters you cannot use.

If you just want to reference char's like the pied piper, peter pan, a lady in a shoe, you don't have to worry about anything :]

#5 It depends on the tale, but for most of them, they are older than your grandfather's great-grandfather. Now, using a specific image of a modern fairy tale could be a problem (say, Bulletta from Darkstalkers which is a representation of Little Red Cap/Riding Hood attributed to Charles Perrault--1697), but the tales themselves are well within the bounds of use. A book of Grimm's fairy tales, though heavily censored by the brothers, or Aesop's Fables should get you pointing in the right direction.

#6 Do a google search for "project gutenburg," they have free e-texts online of public domain stuff including a lot of the classics

as others have said, almost all of these are public domain and can be freely used -- like, for example, the nutcracker story ;)

edit: in fact, you'd be surprised what's public domain, including war of the worlds!

#7 Is their a site that would list the charcters and fairy tales that are public domain? or do I have to go to my public library and ask them?

#8 You could search google and find millions of links.

Like this or this. Project Gutenberg (as mentioned) and Bartleby are also excellent resources. Also note that narrative is a constant restructuring process, so you will most likely find a large number of variations between tales. That's part of the fun of folklore.

#9 A team leader and concept designer and the lot of All Out Fairy Tale (http://www.alloutfairytale.be) we've been looking into this since we started and we came to the conclusion that they mostly are open public.
These stories have been told over the centuries and have been twisted in all kinds of ways (check http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/) that it's nearly impossible to own rights to these kind of things. Like said Disney indeed has the rights to their versions of the fairy tale but those are strictly linked to the designs of the characters. And even so, Shrek-movies did a very nice parody on them without getting in trouble. There are loads of media that take fairy tale characters (McGee, McFarlane for example).
Being the "creator" of twisted fairy tale characters and the research we did back in the day I'm pretty confident about this.

#10

Quote:
And even so, Shrek-movies did a very nice parody on them without getting in trouble.

Shrek had permission from Disney to do what they did.

#11 That is neither here nor there unless they were specifically targeting Disney's assets. Making a little red-riding hood character for your game is not an infringement upon Disney, Capcom (Bulletta from Nightstalkers), or King's Quest 2 unless you specifically target their art assets and such. The fairy tale characters themselves are not "protected" but their image representation is (unless it's a newly created character such as Shrek).

#12 Shrek was made by renegade, disgruntled ex-Disney workers, it's full of jabs against Disney [Eisner= Farguaad (say it 5 times fast... "fuckwad"), the empty disneyworld, the characters, etc... mickey's trademark costume is even in there] but yes I suppose they had a green light from Disney yea....simply cause they couldn't tell them not to do it anyways.

Imagine Grimm being alive today though, he would be the richest man in the world if he kept his rights.

#13 :o) I grew up with Grimm's fairytales. They were the good non-watered down versions, where giants ate people (not became their friends) and witches ate children and ogres ate men and....I'm sensing a theme here!

Er anyways. I have always wanted to make a few fairytale adventures that keep the dark and often scary sense that fairytales originally had.

#14 And frighteningly enough, the brothers Grimm toned down the local fairy tales and created the children's market for tales. Little Red Cap (Riding Hood) originally duped into eating her grandmother's flesh, drinking her blood, and took off her clothes to get into bed with the "wolf" or "ogre" (depending on the country of telling) where she was murdered. Though originally told as a reflection of salon culture in France (at least the earliest reference known: 1697 [publication date]), LRC/RH was Disneyfied by Grimm as well. Grimm kept the original, but when they released their Children's version of the tales (which became the official reprinted versions), they had made a number of narrative changes such as a wooductter/hunter coming along and saving Little red. If you want to read a fun account of how LRRH, pick up Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale.

Quote:Over the years, scholars have piled an entire cosmos of meanings on this small girl's shoulders. Some call her tale a seasonal myth, an allegory of the sun swallowed by night, or the personification of Good triumphing over Evil. Her basket of wine and cakes, it's said, represents Christian Communion; her red cape stands for menstrual blood. Some see the tale in Freudian terms as the Ego overcome by the Id; others see it as symbolic of the relationship between Man and Woman. And inevitably the tale has been a vehicle for imparting sexual ethics in keeping with the social fabric of the times. Tellers have consciously and subconsciously manipulated the plot to portray a seduction by a temptress, the rape of a virgin or the passage of a young girl into womanhood. From a structural perspective, the plot is powerfully simple. Opposites collidegood and evil, beast and human, male and female. How the heroine negotiates this clash determines her fate. Thus over time "Little Red Riding Hood" has become the quintessential moral primer.
...
Little Red Riding Hood's perennial popularity is due in part to her ability to adapt to the times. Every year, reincarnations of the story pop up in print, on television, on billboards and advertisements, in children's games and adult jokes.
...
Yet for all Little Red Riding Hood's ubiquity, most people today remain remarkably, and sometimes even comically, oblivious to the tale's origins and underlying meanings. In 1990 two California school districts banned the story, because of an illustration showing Red's basket with a bottle of wine as well as fresh bread and butter. The story line of Red disrobing and climbing into bed with the wolf passed muster. But the wine, they said, might be seen as condoning the use of alcohol.

Orenstein Catherine. Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Ten Moral Tales from the Forest. New York, NY. Basic Books: 2002.

EDIT: peculiar pedantry

#15 I think what you are asking about is a bit muddled.

Copyrights and trademark expressions are covered. You cannot copy-paste part of a Disney script; you could also get nailed if your version of Cinderella looked just like Disney's.

But, sniff around and find earlier stories (like Brothers Grimm) that have lapsed into the public domain, and "clean room" create your own version based on that source.

Best regards,

Chikako
Meshbox Design - Professional 3D Content for Games
http://www.meshbox.com