Just like any major company, Disney has its share of Ethical, Legal and Regulatory Issues. These include Copyright, Censorship, Competition, Ownership, Representation and Propaganda/ Influence, along with many other things.
Copyright is an issue with any company, not just Disney. The first Copyright laws were introduced in Britain, due to the fact that there were books that had been wrongfully copies and claimed to be the works of others. The first Statute was 'An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned', or just 'The Statute of Anne' for short, and was introduced in 1709. Copyright basically means that the original author/ artist of a piece of work are to have full credit for their work. If you take a piece of copyrighted work and claim it as your own, without getting formal permission from the owner, you would face a criminal charge.
One of the major controversies of the company is the Subliminal Messages which were supposedly placed within a few films. These messages were discovered by the America Life League during the mid 90's. They claimed that several films such as The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and The Rescuers all contained sexual innuendo's within them. The Lion King allegation was denied by an animator at Disney, Tom Sito. The scene in question was one when Simba is looking up towards the sky and the stars spell out a message. Sito explains that it says 'SFX' as in Special Effects and was intended to be an Easter Egg signature for the department, however people interpreted it as 'SEX' which caused the controversy. These controversial supposed ‘subliminal messages’ did spark a recall of some titles in order for them to be re-edited before being re-released. One such example of this is ‘The Rescuers’. On the 8th January 1999 had to recall 3.4 million copies of the film after an image of a topless woman was found in two of the films frames. Considering that there are around 110,000 frames in the entire film, it isn’t a surprise that this isn’t normally noticeable when viewing the film normally. A spokeswoman from ‘the independent’ gave a statement two days after the recall was announced stating that ‘A Disney spokeswoman said that the images in The Rescuers were placed in the film during production, but she declined to say what they were or who placed them... The company said the aim of the recall was to keep its promise to families that they can trust and rely on the Disney brand to provide the best in family entertainment.’ The film was edited and eventually re-released March 23, 1999.
Disney over the years has also had opposition from those who think that they represent females in a certain way, which shows how a woman should act and what they are expected to do. Many of their mainstream princesses all possess similar details such as very curvy hourglass figure and big bright eyes. This is telling young girls that this is what you should grow up to look like, and if you don't, you won't end up with 'prince Charming'. Editor and writer for the New York Times Penny Orenstein wrote an article named ‘What’s wrong with Cinderella?’ which explores how this ‘princess’ image is everywhere and young girls can’t get away from its influence. The article can be found here (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/magazine/24princess.t.html?pagewanted=all ). Another way in which some groups are concerned about the influence on young girls is how the princesses always need a man to rescue them, even if they are strong themselves. Although you must remember that many of the stories in which the princesses originated from were written in times when the roles of men and women were very different from today.
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