Why is ‘It’s on like Donkey Kong’ a trademark term?

I first learned of the idea of copyright at a very young age.

Growing up, I spent a large amount of time playing video games, particularly Nintendo games. I loved going on adventures with Mario or Donkey Kong, and even when I wasn’t playing these games, I would be thinking of new and exciting games for them that I wanted to play. I must have been only 5 at the time when I decided I wanted to make my own Donkey Kong game, and spent the day at home drawing up carefully planned crayon designs for the different levels and drawing the various items and powers that I wanted to introduce. As a 5 year old, this was a creative masterpiece for me, and I thought I could just send it to some company and have them give me a brand new game in no time. When my Dad got home that night, I was eager to show him my work, and explained all of my ideas. He tried to stop himself from laughing, but explained that I wasn’t allowed to use their characters or worlds for my own game, and showed me the little ‘c’ that was next to their names. He explained the idea of copyright in the most basic terms possible, telling me it would be stealing and they wouldn’t let anyone else see my work. I was obviously a bit upset that all my hard work had gone to waste, but to compensate for this, my Dad pretended to email Nintendo my drawings and told me we just had to wait for a reply. Needless to say, I never heard back from them.

Now, I can fully comprehend how difficult copyright law can be at times. I feel lucky to be part of a country where copyright is automatic, which simplifies the process for content creators immensely. Our lecture today had a large portion of it dedicated to exploring copyright law, and there were a lot of elements to it that I was learning about for the first time. One of these is the term ‘Rights of Ownership’, which entitles the owner a few things and outlines some important information.

• Firstly, the owner of the work is always the creator, unless it was created under the employment of others or part of contractually obligated work.
• The owner is given the right to reproduce, publish, perform, communicate or make an adaption of the work. This is relevant to literary, dramatic
• Sound recordings, cinematographic and TV rights allow the owner to make copies, have their work seen/heard, rented and communicated

There is also a set of moral rights which apply to all copyright works. This basically ensures that all work is attributed to the creator, and apply even when a work is in the public domain.

Copyright lasts the life of the creator, plus 70 years. This is something which I find interesting, because it’s never been a constant figure. It used to be plus 50 years, but the ‘House of Mouse’ lobbied to have it extended when fears were raised of Mickey Mouse going into public domain. Something I did not know about copyright was that films made before the 1^st of May 1969 are part of the public domain.

The thing which I was concerned about was the fine line between an original product and one which breaches copyright law. This was covered as something which is ‘substantially similar’, in that the idea (or plot) is presented with common elements, similar settings, roles, central characters etc. It was phrased as ‘could a normal person conclude that they are the same or substantially similar. This is from a media world that lives on intertextual references and repurposing ideas and themes to create something new. I once heard that every film you create will be a sum of all of the past films you have seen, which gives more weight to the idea of watching as much as possible before you try making anything. Does this make the media a world of people drawing on the past, or are the products that people remember going to be the truly original, or simply the best execution of the already thought.