Las Demandas por Regalías VS Disney
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| Publicado: 22 Nov 2005 |
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Es de todos conocido que los redoblajes se los debemos a que la Disney se niega a pagar regalías por la explotación de las voces en medios distintos a la exhibición en salas cinematográficas, el caso más famoso fue el de Peggy Lee, y otro que más ha sonado es el de Evangelina Elizondo, pero son de las únicas que sabemos. Pues bien al parecer no son las únicas que han pelado contra el Gigante Disney, pues también otros artistas han reclamado lo que les corresponde, por ejemplo: Lupita Pérez Arias, Alejandro Algara, La hija de "Tin-Tán" (por partida doble, por parte de su padre, Germán Valdés y por parte de su madre Rosalía Julián), que el caso lo llevó primero el Bufete "Jalife y Asociados" pero al aperecer dieron carpetazo al asunto. Lupita Pérez Arias continúo por otros medios, pero desgraciadamente no logró nada, sólo el malagradecimiento de los de Dsiney al decidir redoblar, antes que pagar, la única que sigue con el pleito es Evangelina Elizondo.
Podría pensase que sólo en las versiones internacionales existen este tipo de demandas, pero he encontrado diversos artículos, donde al parecer Peggy Lee, no sólo fue la única que demandó a Disney, hubo otros de las voces originales en inglés que demandaron, entre ellos Loui Prima, Mary Costa y la misma Illene Woods, les dejo estos artículos para que conozcan un poco más sobre el asunto (EN INGLÉS):
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Stars share royalties victory
Wednesday, 26 June, 2002
 Peggy Lee led the campaign for payment
More than 150 veteran music stars and their heirs will share a $4.75m (£3.1m) payout after a judge ruled that a deal on decades of unpaid royalties was fair.
The campaign to be paid by music giant Universal had been led by jazz legend Peggy Lee, who died in January.
The families of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, Ella Fitzgerald and Bill Haley and the Comets are also in line for a slice of the money.
The deal comes despite the objections of former Dallas star Larry Hagman, whose singer and actress mother Mary Martin was one of those owed royalties. He said the settlement was not good enough.
The 161 stars and their heirs alleged they were owed millions of dollars after the record company under-reported sales figures and over-charged them for services such as album packaging.
Lee's lawyers claimed Universal short-changed the artists by paying royalties based on incorrect prices.
A lawyer representing Lee's estate, Cyrus Godfrey, said 90% of the artists were now dead, and it was time to settle the case for the survivors.
The deal was a watershed for the music industry because it showed that even retired or deceased artists could not be ignored by record labels, Mr Godfrey said.
He also said Hagman should realise that the settlement was "in the best interests of the class members".
But Hagman had said the payout was too low "to compensate what has been done to so many outstanding artists in American history".
He now has 30 days to decide whether to opt out of the deal and pursue an individual case.
The plaintiffs all recorded with Decca Records before 1 January 1962.
Their contracts transferred to Universal, owned by media giant Vivendi Universal, through a series of company mergers and acquisitions.
Under-paid
Many of the artists signed contract amendments in the 1980s for the sale of CDs as the format took off, but the court papers said Universal did not keep to the terms of those agreements.
Court papers also said the record company under-paid royalties on record club sales and charged artists too much for album packaging and other services.
Other stars and their heirs, such as country singer Loretta Lynn and the families of the late Bing Crosby and Buddy Holly are pursuing individual cases against the record company.
The heirs of Bing Crosby have also launched their own legal action against Universal, seeking $16m (£11.2m).
Other artists, including Courtney Love and Don Henley, have filed lawsuits alleging similar questionable accounting practices.
Peggy Lee was awarded $2.3m (£1.6m) back royalties in 1991 for video sales of Disney's 1955 film The Lady and the Tramp, which featured her songs.
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Otro Artículo:
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Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1991
The Lady and the Lawsuit
by Sharon Bernstein
Sitting in her wheelchair, frail and with failing eyesight, singer Peggy Lee hardly fits the image of a Hollywood giant killer.
But when the 70-year-old Lee rolls her chair into Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, she thinks she has a good chance of bringing the mammoth Walt Disney Company to its knees, or at least to its checkbook. Lee is suing Disney for $50 million, charging breach of contract and unlawful enrichment over the videocassette release of Lady and the Tramp.
Lee has already convinced the court that Disney violated their original 1952 contract by releasing the tape without her permission. Lee co-wrote six songs and performed the voices of four characters in the film, which has earned more than $140 million altogether – $90 million alone from the video sale, according to her attorney.
But while the court has agreed with her on the facts of the case, the initial ruling against Disney was by no means the end of the road. A trial is necessary to determine what, if any, award should be granted to Lee. And Disney has vowed that as soon as the proceedings are over, it will file an appeal.
"I put my whole heart and soul into this 30 years ago," says Lee, who continues to perform songs from the film in her concerts, "and I deserve to have my contract honored."
In Lady and the Tramp, Lee provided the voices for the characters of the torch-singer dog Peg, the Siamese cats Si and Am, and Lady’s owner Darling – and was paid $3,500. She and her writing partner, Sonny Burke, earned another $1,000 for the use of six songs he and Lee collaborated on for the movie. The pair retained all rights for phonographic recordings and transcriptions, but their contract – like the contracts of most performers of the day – didn’t foresee the advent of video and the huge audience it would provide for their work.
According to attorneys on both sides, the case hangs on the court’s interpretation of the term transcription.
Disney is arguing that the term, as it was used in the 1952 contract between Lee and the studio, was not intended to cover future technology, such as video.
"Our position… is that the term referred to audio recording discs, primarily used in radio broadcasting," Clair said. Disney, he said, retained the right to use Lee’s voice for radio, television, and according to the contract, "all other improvements and devices which are now or hereafter may be used."
But Deborah Nesset, Lee’s attorney, argues that Lee retained the rights to transcriptions in order to protect herself against just such a claim by Disney. Nesset insists, and the court has agreed, that a "transcription" is simply a copy of Lee’s work – in any form.
Ironically, in another case, Disney itself made the argument that a transcription is simply a copy. Disney won that case, which was filed in 1969 against the Alaska Television Network, which had been broadcasting Disney productions without permission.
Clair insists that there is no contradiction, explaining that in the earlier case, the word "transcription" was used as it had been defined in 1909, when the U.S. copyright law was written, not as the word was used in Lee’s case in 1952.
It’s been nearly 40 years since Lee, then a popular big band singer and songwriter, agreed to help her friend Walt Disney make an animated feature about a dog from the wrong side of the tracks who falls in love with a pampered uptown pooch named Lady.
Lady and the Tramp was a theatrical success in the mid-50s, and was re-released several times. It was a major hit on video, outstripping Top Gun as the hottest video seller of 1987. More than 3 million copies were sold.
"When they came out with the cassette, I thought I would look at my contract," said Lee. She did, and after consulting with an attorney, determined that the portion that forbade Disney to make and sell transcriptions could be applied to videotapes.
Lee is not the only performer to sue for video rights: Mary Costa, who provided the voice for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, filed a lawsuit almost identical to Lee’s in Florida last year, and another suit has been filed on behalf of the performers in Cinderella . The estate of Fred Astaire is suing CBS for using the late star’s films in television and video productions without permission. All the cases are still pending.
"People are coming out of the woodwork and suing about this," said Nesset, Lee’s attorney, but it’d a difficult road. "A lot of these people are quite elderly. A lot of people are dead. When the estate brings a lawsuit, it’s not going to be as effective as the actual performer."
According to Thomas White, an entertainment industry consultant who is chief adviser to the estate of Fred Astaire, the performers tend to win, but they must be willing to put up a fight.
"The film companies, by virtue of the fact that they are controlling the print [of the film], think they can do whatever they want," said White. "And they continue to do that until the artists assert their rights."
Peggy Lee is no stranger to the need to put up a fight. She has been fighting for her life for years.
Disabled by successive falls that twice broker her pelvis, Lee refuses to stop trying to walk. Her wheelchair is not motorized, because "I plan on walking." With the help of an assistant, she moves every day from her wheelchair or bed to a stationary bicycle, where she exercises her legs as much as possible. Every day, she attempts to take a few steps.
Bedridden with a heart condition for the past several months, Lee used the occasion to write a children’s book. When her eyesight failed, she hung on until a combination of doctors and perseverance actually brought some of it back.
She continues to sing, despite a goiter that rests near her vocal cords, and to tour, performing seated on a raised platform. Her latest album, The Peggy Lee Songbook: There’ll Be Another Spring, won her a Grammy nomination for best female jazz vocal performance.
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Otro Artículo sobre Loui Prima:
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The Monkey vs. the Mouse
When Louis Prima's widow Gia took Disney to court, she was after more than the bare necessities.
By Mark Miester
08 21 01
 Louis Prima may have let Disney make a monkey out of him, but his widow wasn't about to let the "King of Swingers" settle for peanuts.
In May, Gia M. Prima, widow of the New Orleans-born entertainer, settled a lawsuit against Disney over home video and DVD royalties from Disney's 1967 animated feature The Jungle Book. Prima, who died in 1978, turned in a memorable performance in the film as the voice of King Louie, the jive-talking, scat-singing orangutan who delivered the inspired ode to hominidae "I Wanna Be Like You (The Monkey Song)."
Gia Prima had sued Disney for breach of contract, non-payment of royalties, unjust enrichment, fraud and negligent misrepresentation. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed and both Prima and Disney, through their attorneys, declined to comment on the case.
The case was the latest in a series of suits brought against Disney over royalties from videocassette and DVD sales. In 1991, singer Peggy Lee was awarded $2.3 million in damages over Disney's unauthorized use of her performance in the home video version of the 1955 animated feature Lady and the Tramp, which grossed a reported $72 million in videocassette sales following its release in the mid-1980s. In the wake of Lee's suit, Mary Costa, the voice of Sleeping Beauty, and Phil Harris, the voice of Baloo the bear in The Jungle Book and Thomas O'Malley in The Aristocats, each sued Disney over home video and DVD royalties. Both cases were eventually settled out of court.
"The language of the contracts during that period made no mention whatsoever of future technologies," says Jim Hill, a columnist for Orlando Weekly who covers the business side of Disney. "It was pretty much the notion if you did it for movies, it would be rebroadcast for television. Now, given the huge sums of money these things are generating on home video and DVD, some of the older performers -- who were literally paid $1,5002,000 for their appearance -- obviously want to come back to the trough."
What made the Prima suit unique is that it was one of the first examples of the estate of a star -- rather than the star him or herself -- going after Disney. According to Hill, the lack of a live, exploited legend to generate negative publicity for Disney may have put Gia Prima at a strategic disadvantage. "Unless Disney senses that their family-friendly image is being sullied, they stay tough," Hill notes. "One of the reasons Disney lost the Peggy Lee case was [Lee's attorneys] rolled her into court in a wheelchair every day -- here's the mean Mouse refusing to pay Peggy Lee."
Lee may have played a greater role in Lady and the Tramp -- she co-wrote six songs and provided the voices of four characters -- but today it's nearly impossible to separate The Jungle Book from Prima's performance. Songwriters Robert and Richard Sherman envisioned the ambitious orangutan as "the king of the swingers" when they composed the Dixieland-flavored "I Wanna Be Like You" for the film, the last animated feature to be personally supervised by Walt Disney prior to his death. Prima's swaggering hipster persona was a perfect match for the scat-singing hepcat King Louie. Disney animators flew to Las Vegas to see Prima in concert and incorporated Prima's histrionic onstage mannerisms into their sketches. King Louie's number even features what amounts to a simian second line, a play on Prima's tradition of ending performances with a parade through the audience.
Phil Harris' slacker anthem "The Bare Necessities" was the film's better-known song at the time, but "I Wanna Be Like You" gained popularity in the 1990s, mirroring Prima's own posthumous resurgence. Along with Prima's "Jump, Jive and Wail" and "Sing Sing Sing," "I Wanna Be Like You" became a touchstone of the retro-swing movement. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy covered it for the soundtrack to the 1996 film Swingers.
But while Disney rode Prima's newly expansive coattail to financial success with the home video release of The Jungle Book, Gia Prima claimed, the Prima estate got none of the lucrative royalties.
Prima's 1965 Jungle Book contract called for him to be paid $1,500 per day for his work on the film, with a guaranteed minimum of $7,500. In addition, he was to receive a royalty based on the sales of recordings. Exactly what type of recordings were entitled to royalty payments was at the heart of the dispute.
According to Prima's contract, the royalty obligation related to the "manufacture, sale and distribution of phonograph recordings derived from soundtrack materials." The contract goes on to define "records," "phonograph records" and "recordings" to include "all forms of recording and reproduction manufactured by any method and intended primarily for use as home entertainment." Under that definition, Gia Prima argued, videocassettes and DVDs -- recordings primarily for use as home entertainment -- would trigger the royalty obligation.
"This grant of rights by Louis Prima only gave Disney the exclusive right to exploit The Jungle Book motion picture photoplay in any format for public viewing," said Prima's complaint. "It did not give Disney the right to sell and distribute videocassette, DVD or other recordings of The Jungle Book to consumers for use as home entertainment without any additional compensation to Louis Prima."
Disney countered that Prima's contract granted Disney the full rights to exploit The Jungle Book by any means and in any format and that, as was standard practice, royalties were to be based on sales of recordings taken from the soundtrack, not recordings of the film itself. Videocassettes and DVDs, Disney argued, are nothing more than the motion picture itself in a particular format, and Prima was paid in full for his work on the motion picture. "The only reasonable interpretation of the contract is that its royalty provisions apply solely to the sale of sound recordings, and not to the distribution of the motion picture itself, whether on videocassette or some other present or future format," said Disney in a memorandum in support of its motion for summary judgement
In an interview published prior to the settlement, Gia Prima expressed her frustration at Disney's refusal to pay the disputed royalties. "This would never happen if Walt Disney were alive," Prima told the U.K. Daily Express. "Mr. Disney was a wonderful man who loved Louis. When he died, the personal side of the studio died with him."
Louis Prima had been a fan of Disney before appearing in The Jungle Book. In 1965, he recorded the album Let's Fly With Mary Poppins, a jazzed-up collection of songs from the Disney film.
In the wake of the Peggy Lee case and similar suits over videocassette and DVD rights, Hill says, Disney amended the language of its contracts to essentially cover technologies not even invented. "Obviously, one of the reasons Disney opted to seal this settlement is that if they had people coming forward trying to get this money, it could be disastrous," Hill says. "But again, one of the longest arms of the Disney company is its legal department. They'll keep this as tightly wrapped up as they can and hope that some other senior citizen doesn't get a smart idea."
Gia Prima has not been shy about defending her late husband's estate in court. In recent years she has also sued both Campbell Soup Co. and the parent company of the Olive Garden restaurant chain over the use of Prima sound-alikes in television commercials.
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y otro de Illene Woods:
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'Cinderella' voice recalls fairy-tale era
By Roger M. Showley
STAFF WRITER
October 8, 2005
Ilene Woods may not be a household name or face, but her voice has entranced generations of little girls dreaming of marrying Prince Charming.
Now 75 and living in Calabasas, Woods was 20 when her dream came true on celluloid as the voice of Cinderella in the Disney classic, released in 1950 and now coming out in a special two-disc DVD version.
"I think the time I spent making 'Cinderella' was probably the nicest time," she said in a telephone interview from her home, where she says she has a few Disney mementoes on display and more packed away in storage.
"It was a happy time at the studio because everybody ate lunch together – Walt Disney and his brother (Roy), all the artists, all sat together. It was a happy, creative time. I think it will never be that again."
Woods was a veteran in entertainment on the dawn of her 18th birthday in 1948, when she landed the part that 350 other girls had auditioned for. She had performed in school plays, sung at the White House for presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman and on radio stations (including her own "Ilene Woods Show" in her native New Hampshire). She also performed in World War II bond drives with the likes of actress Lana Turner and band leader Paul Whiteman.
So, she didn't think anything of it when two song writers, Jerry Livingston and Mack David, asked her to record a demo record of songs being considered for an unknown movie.
But a few days later, Disney talent scouts called her to come to the studio and meet Walt Disney, who wanted to sign her for the part.
For $2,500, she spent bits of 1948 and 1949 recording songs and dialogue, including yawns and sneezes, and acted out pieces of the story on black-and-white film for artists to use as reference in their animation work. The DVD includes a "making of" featurette with film of another actress, Helene Stanley, who also acted out action for animators. Stills of Woods appear on the DVD along with a 1995 interview. Also appearing is Lucille Bliss, who voiced Anastasia, one of the stepsisters.
When Woods saw the finished movie at the studio lot theater, she said she was enthralled.
"I got lost in the movie and forgot I had had anything to do with it," she recalled. "Seeing it for the first time, it was just wonderful."
Her father told her he could discern some of her mannerisms in the animated character. And later, when her 3-year-old daughter Bethany attended a showing in Westwood, she burst out with, "That's my mommy, that's my mommy!"
"I was trying to be so subtle about the whole thing," Woods said, and a woman behind them responded, "Isn't that charming – she thinks you're Cinderella."
After Woods' first husband died, she married Ed Shaughnessy, a drummer on the "Tonight Show With Johnny Carson" for 30 years, in 1962. They had two sons, Dan, now a Marriott executive in the Palm Springs area, and Jim, who died at the age of 18 in a head-on car crash caused by a drunken driver.
"It never leaves you," she said. "That sort of thing you carry around in your pocket, and it grabs you by the throat."
Woods did no more work for Disney but continued in the business until 1977, branching out into TV and acting as a hostess and spokesman for United Cerebral Palsy telethons – a cause she joined at the request of a friend.
"I loved it – I met so many wonderful children," she said. "I watched them grow and improve, which some of them can. It was a very fulfilling time."
She also appeared, often twice a week, at Lighthouse International's program for the blind in New York, reading stories to children.
"I looked forward to it every week – it was so rewarding. They were so thrilled when I arrived as Cinderella," she recalled.
Woods took up still-life painting and then portraiture at the urging of her son Jim, who she said aspired to go into show business.
"Everybody wanted me to paint their daughter as Cinderella," she said.
Still sounding something like Cinderella, even 55 years later, Woods said she kept in touch only with the actress who voiced the Fairy Godmother, Verna Felton (who also voiced one of the elephants in "Dumbo"). She later met Mary Costa, who voiced Aurora in Disney's 1959 "Sleeping Beauty" as well as Adriana "Snow White" Caselotti and Kathryn Beaumont, who did Wendy in "Peter Pan" and Alice in "Alice in Wonderland."
"I really never spent a lot of time at the studio after 'Cinderella.' Disney didn't know where I was until they found me through Ed on the 'Tonight Show' for a tour with the video (released in the 1980s)," she said. "I had gone completely in seclusion as a wife and mother."
In fact, she didn't let on to her own sons of her fame until they recognized her voice on a radio spot during one of the early film re-releases.
As with other Disney voice talents, Woods tried to gain new royalties for her work with "Cinderella" when it went to video, but her lawsuit came to nothing. However, she said she is paid for promotions these days.
And who was Woods' fairy godmother? Her grandmother, Hattie James.
"She raised me more than my mother. She was kind and bright and understanding. She was everything to me. She died when I was very young. Life was never the same."
Although the feminist movement often has castigated stories like "Cinderella," Woods said the Disney portrayal emphasized Cinderella's determination to better her life and not let her cruel stepmother and stepsisters smother her dreams.
"If you believe and want it badly enough, I think you can make your dreams come true," she said.
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Roger M. Showley: (619) 293-1286; roger.showley@uniontrib.com
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Saludos
Miguel
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