Copyright protection of Disney cartoons according the Italian Court of Cassation.

In November 2021, the Court of Cassation (the Italian “Supreme Court”) ruled, upon appeal against Milan’s Court of Appeal ruling, on the duration of the copyrights relating to some of Disney’s most famous cartoons, including “Saludos Amigos” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, created in the first half of the twentieth century. 

The case, dating back to the ‘90s, originated from a negative declaratory and damages lawsuit, where an Italian company, following the seizure of a vast number of videotapes of the great Disney’s classics that it had marketed, sought to declare the American company’s copyrights on the works in question null and void on the grounds that they had entered into the public domain.

The Court of Cassation had already ruled on the same matter in the framework of parallel criminal proceedings: in judgment no. 4978/2009, the Joint Chambers of the Court had ruled out the possibility of applying to those Disney works certain extensions of the statutory duration of copyrights provided for by special laws.

That precedent, however, was unexpectedly overturned by the decision commented upon here, which also ruled on the claim for damages brought against Disney on accounts of the seizure executed against the Italian company.

The Court found that the extension of the duration of exploitation rights pursuant to Article 17 of Law 52/1996 and Article 3 of Legislative Decree no. 154/1997 was retroactively applicable to cinematographic works such as those in suit and thus upheld the Milan Court of Appeal’s judgment, which had rejected the Italian company’s claims by ruling that the Disney works had not entered into the public domain at the date of their disputed reproduction.

On damages, the Court of Cassation noted that, even if the works in suit had entered into the public domain at the time when the plaintiff’s videotapes were seized, the claim for damages would still be baseless: the seizure had been ordered by a judicial authority and, therefore, any causal link with any conduct of the defendant had been broken.