Data show that in the fourth quarter alone, Disney's revenue from licensing, publishing and game business was $3 billion.
This is equivalent to the profit of Lei Jun's Xiaomi 18 for a whole year, which can buy the whole of mobike.
0 1
scale
Disney's high income from copyright is inseparable from its powerful legal department, which is called Pizza Hut in California.
The data comes from FindLaw.
According to our preliminary investigation, Disney has at least 185 in-service lawyers in the United States alone.
Among them, General Counsel 1 is equivalent to the level of vice president and reports directly to President Robert A. Iger. In addition, there are 37 other managers, 82 full-time lawyers and 66 full-time consultants.
According to the plan revealed by General Counsel Alan Braverman in an interview, after the large-scale reorganization of Disney's business departments (studios, parks and resorts, etc.), the number of lawyers in the new legal department he rebuilt will be expanded to at least 350.
This scale has surpassed many large law firms in the United States and is the sum of the number of global partners of King & Wood.
Organizational structure of Disney's legal department in the United States
The structure of their legal department is very clear, and the two teams, lawyers and consultants, have their own duties and are completely distinct.
If Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are two important cash cows in Disney, then at least dozens of legal personnel are taking care of and guarding them on each tree to prevent the fruit from being lost.
02
deal with
What are the incomes of these crucial gardeners?
Take their common method, Allen braverman, as an example: in 20 13, his total income was 4 million dollars, and in 20 16, it rose to nearly 6 million dollars, and he can already get114.7 million dollars, which is equivalent to about 75 million yuan.
Alan Braverman surpassed General Electric (GE) CEO Fablet Kate Dennis, becoming the most profitable GC in the United States in 20 16.
Alan Braverman, General Counsel of Disney (USA)
03
value
The legal support brought by such a high-income legal group to Disney is of course super-standard.
In fact, all kinds of intellectual property litigation disputes that are often teased by netizens are only the basic work of this huge and professional legal department.
Many netizens went to Disney's Weibo comment area to report vision china.
What they do more is to give the best solution to the company's content management configuration and resource use.
The most representative is the pretreatment of Mickey Mouse's media image copyright finally expired in recent years.
As we all know, Mickey, who was born in 1928, faced the copyright expiration twice in 1984 and 2003, but both times he lobbied Congress to amend the copyright law, which led to the famous Copyright Term Extension Act, and continued to earn income about Mickey's image in the next 40 years.
But soon after, in 2023, according to the current copyright law in the United States, Mickey's image will soon expire again and will soon enter the public domain.
No one can predict whether Congress can be successfully lobbied to continue amending the copyright law this time.
A new biscuit with Mickey trademark
At this time, Disney's law enforcement personnel proposed and began to transfer the value of this intellectual property right to thousands of new registered trademarks, including various words, names and pictures.
This legal strategy achieves two important goals: first, it transfers the company's property to a legal system that provides indefinite life. The second is to promote the expansion of commodity licensing. At present, the commodity licensing business has earned billions of dollars, with extremely high profits.
If we don't pay enough attention to legal knowledge, this shrewd strategy will never be implemented correctly, and the value of a large number of cultural products will also be lost.
In the field of intellectual property management, Disney is just one of many companies that successfully use complex legal strategies to obtain relevant commercial profits.
However, his achievements are obvious to all. It is not difficult to foresee that this will be the best model for many emerging companies in the future business society to learn.