Basic Trope: A company has a copyright or trademark on something you wouldn't think could be copyrighted or trademarked.
- Straight: Trope Co. owns the rights to a classic folk song.
- Exaggerated: Trope Co. owns the rights to everything in existence.
- Downplayed: Trope Co. owns the rights to a synonym of a generic word.
- Justified: Trope Co. is a huge company that wants to make money.
- Inverted:
- Trope Co.'s assets are owned by various people.
- An expensive, blockbuster movie released only a year prior is placed into the public domain.
- Subverted: Trope Co. owns the rights to a classic song, but the song was written as a folk song and what they own is the rock version.
- Double Subverted: The original song is copyrighted too.
- Parodied:
- Trope Co. owns the rights to the very concept of trademarks.
- Trope Co. owns the rights to works of intellectual property that haven't been released yet. The powers that be at Trope Co. may even have commissioned Time Travel (which they also own, by the way) just for this purpose.
- No matter when, where, what, or how, every time you do anything with something copyrighted by Trope Co., its lawyers pop up demanding royalties.
- Zig-Zagged: Trope Co. owns the rights to a folk song, albeit a different version, which was bought from another company, which bought the rights from yet another company, which had bought it from Trope Co. in the first place.
- Averted: No for-profit entity has trademarks of anything simple, ridiculous, or both.
- Enforced: "We want to show just how greedy and large Trope Co. is. Let's have them trademark basic things!"
- Lampshaded: "I can't believe THAT is trademarked?!"
- Invoked: Trope Co. CEO Bob buys the rights to many classical tunes and generic concepts.
- Exploited: Alice, CEO of rival company Incompetence, Inc., tries to buy some of the things that Trope Co. owns.
- Defied: Judge Charlie denies Trope Co. the trademarks and/or copyrights that were filed for.
- Discussed: "Trope Co. must be rich to be able to trademark that much stuff!"
- Conversed: "Why do big corporations on these shows always own simple, generic things?"
- Implied: A trademark symbol is placed next to many, many written words, with a copyright disclaimer, after everything that is written down, that says "[Terms] are trademarks of Trope Co. in all countries. All Rights Reserved," and said disclaimer is also littered with trademark symbols.
- Deconstructed:
- Trope Co. owns everything, and no other company can make competing products without the risk of being sued. All other companies are forced to shut down, and Trope Co. becomes a monopoly and a MegaCorp.
- Trope Co.'s practice of trademarking common words and suing random people for absurdly large amounts of money gets the company boycotted.
- Reconstructed:
- Trope Co. is broken into many different companies that also collectively own everything, but the companies still have the Trope Co. branding on their products.
- Because Trope Co. owns everything and employs all the most competent (and least scrupulous) lawyers, even the company's most implacable opponents have no choice but to pay it through the nose in court and the marketplace.
- Trope Co. invests its profits in the communities of the country or countries where its intellectual property rights apply, so people don't have a reason to boycott it.
- Played for Laughs: Trope Co. owns the rights to natural bodily functions.
- Played for Drama: Trope Co. has to sue many people for violating their trademarks.
- Played for Horror:
- Violating the terms and conditions of Trope Co.'s copyrights is grounds for being instantly condemned to a Fate Worse than Death.
- Trope Co. are downright Abusive Precursors whose insane greedy dogma calls for doing horrible things to civilizations who didn't even know they existed. Not being a contacted species inventing the wheel independently isn't an excuse for "stealing" and must be harshly punished.
Back to Disney Owns This Trope.note
