Disney Has Had Baby Yoda GIFs Removed From The Internet Over Copyright Concerns
One of the most talked-about and popular elements of Lucasfilm’s The Mandalorian is “The Child”, which the fans are referring to as Baby Yoda. The character is so damn adorable and the character has sparked a ton of online content including GIFs.
Well, apparently Disney doesn’t want Baby Yoda GIFs flooding the Internet. An online publication named Vulture created some GIFs for the lovable character, but Kathryn VanArendonk, a reviewer of the site, has revealed that their Baby Yoda GIFs were removed from Giphy for copyright reasons.
I checked, you can not find any GIFs of the child on giphy! It’s pretty ridiculous. I’m not sure why GIFs are a problem, especially when there are photos of the character all over the place now. VanArendonk included a follow-up tweet explaining why this should not have happened.
meanwhile this is LITERALLY the example in this forbes piece about gifs and copyright law https://t.co/QYHxnyyuJV pic.twitter.com/x5aVBsc0iS
— Kathryn VanArendonk (@kvanaren) November 21, 2019
The highlighted part from the shared Forbes article includes says: “According to Jeff John Roberts of Fortune, GIFs can be considered 'transformative' under copyright law because they do not undermine the market for the original work: 'No one, for instance, is going to watch a Star Wars GIF instead of the original movie.'"
This is certainly an interesting move made by Disney, but they are Disney, and they pretty much have the power to do what they want.