Works with their own pages:
- Parodied In-Universe on The Simpsons a couple of times:
- In "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?", Herb Powell is talking to his fellow beggars sitting around a fire. One of them says that he had been operating Disney massage parlors, which were obviously unlicensed. Once Disney found out, their lawyers sued him for every penny, both for the copyright infringement and the PR damage his wildly inappropriate use of their characters caused. He tried to negotiate with them by changing the logo and putting Mickey's pants back on, but to no avail, and he still thinks they were being unreasonable.
- One episode which provides this page's quote has Krusty the Clown, upset that a mural in a daycare features unauthorized use of his likeness, has a group of men sandblast the images of his face from the mural. This was based on a real-life incident where Disney told three daycares in Florida to remove murals of their characters from their walls
. - Jokingly averted at the end of "The President Wore Pearls" when the episode ends with a caption which reads "On the advice of our lawyers, we swear we have never heard of a musical based on the life of Eva Perón".
- At times, several music videos of Disney's DTV were pulled from YouTube due to music rights. In 2009, several of them were blocked by Warner Music Group.
- These songs all appeared on WMG's album Toon Tunes: Action-Packed Anthems, and Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego and Sailor Moon were also blocked for the same reason.
- Disney's purchase of Marvel Comics put an end to Sony's production of The Spectacular Spider-Man. (In general, Disney tried to avoid screwing with existing licensing deals, but Sony gave up the TV rights to Spidey so they could keep the movie rights.) Greg Weisman explained the show's situation here; he even points out that the companies themselves weren't to blame, but that it was just bad corporate luck. As of 2022, The Spectacular Spider-Man is streaming on Disney+, thanks to an output deal with Sony. But since Sony still produced Spider-Man films, Spectacular's Spider-Man appears in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, complete with Josh Keaton reprising the role. The closest Greg Weisman has come to working with the show again is The Spectacular Spider-Men, a new Spider-Man comic he would write for Marvel featuring both Peter Parker and Miles Morales.
- Disney later repeated the above method with Star Wars: The Clone Wars on Cartoon Network after acquiring Lucasfilm. Thankfully, episodes produced at the time of cancellation later aired on Netflix. Meanwhile, a four-episode arc with unfinished animation was posted to the official Star Wars website for free, another arc called "Bad Batch" was screened at a Star Wars Celebration in 2015, and episodes that didn't make it past the writing stage were adapted to a four-issue comic miniseries called Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir and a novel called Dark Disciple. Eventually, Disney Un-Canceled The Clone Wars for one last season, which debuted in February 2020.
- This caused the demise of King Louie of The Jungle Book in all Disney media for quite some time. The family of the late Louis Prima (who voiced Louie in the original movie) sued Disney because Jim Cummings (1952) did too good a job impersonating Prima when voicing the character in TaleSpin. As a result, Louie was completely absent from The Jungle Book 2 and replaced by an Expy named King Larry in House of Mouse. He finally returned in The Jungle Book (2016), but only name-wise, plus becoming a Gigantopithecus. He did eventually become a playable character in the mobile game Disney Heroes: Battle Mode, likely meaning Louis Prima's estate gave up and let Disney use the original King Louie at last.
- Beavis and Butt-Head is now available on DVD without many of the music video commentary segments due to not being able to license that amount of music. Arguably, those segments were half the reason why the show was entertaining. Even the segments that were made available for the DVD releases (on separate discs from the episodes themselves) aren't available online. Mike Judge wouldn't let a third of the series be released since he was embarrassed by it.
- Some lawsuits by the members of the class depicted in Mrs. Munger's Class (whose likenesses from an old yearbook were used without permission) ended the segment's run on One Saturday Morning and shut the door on plans for an ABC primetime version of the cartoon.
- King of the Hill's third DVD set was released a whole year after the second, and rumor has it that the delay was related to licensing issues for the music, explaining the third to sixth season box sets' lack of bonus features.
- The North American DVD releases of The Tick from Buena Vista. The third season hasn't even been released and the two seasons that were released are missing one episode each.note This was averted in the United Kingdom DVD releases by Liberation Entertainment, as they released all three seasons complete and uncut aside from an abridged intro and the episodes being sped and pitched up.
- Music rights were the reason behind the long wait for Daria on DVD; being a MTV produced show, they used snippets of new music constantly, often using ten or more just one episode. Even just lasting seconds long, it led to a mind-boggling amount of rights to shuffle through. Eventually, they decided it was either clear all the rights, and pricing Daria out of the market altogether, or re-produce music that sounds good enough to pass for whatever mood they were going for.
- Prior to the early 2010s starting with Batman: The Brave and the Bold, there was a contractual requirement that neither Wonder Woman nor any of her supporting characters could appear in any video production in which she was not one of the main characters. This prevented her from appearing in the DC Animated Universe until Justice League, and Wonder Girl was out of both Teen Titans and the first season of Young Justice (2010). At one point, this was so bad that she couldn't appear in other shows in the DCAU, including crossovers with Justice League. Thus, she was the only Justice League founding member to never appear on Static Shock. Thankfully as mentioned above, this was later lifted in the early 2010s, and Wonder Girl was added to Young Justice starting with it's second season, and also made a couple cameos in the Teen Titans reboot series, Teen Titans Go!.
- The Anvilicious Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue was hit with this, though not as originally expected — for a long time, it was believed that the show wasn't re-aired because the producers never got permission from Jim Davis to use Garfield in the show, and he threatened litigation if it ever aired again. However, Mark Evanier (head writer of Garfield and Friends) has debunked the rumor, and explained the original plan which got the copyright holders to cooperate specified limited airings.
- VeggieTales' creator Phil Vischer says in "The Wonderful Wizard of Ha's" commentary note that they got in trouble with New Line Cinema after their release of "Lord of the Beans," as one could argue their 44-minute Affectionate Parody may have been too authentic to the source material. Both episodes have seen limited release and were omitted from "All The Shows, Volume 3," possibly to avoid more legal repercussions.
- This is the major reason why the TV special Daffy Duck and Porky Pig Meet the Groovie Goolies is unlikely get a home video release, since DreamWorks Animation and Warner Bros. are not too fond of each other when it comes to cooperating. The special is available on video sites such as YouTube, but are sourced from low-resolution kinescope prints. And with NBCUniversal's acquisition of DreamWorks in 2016, whether or not it will ever be seen again is even more uncertain. What makes it even more uncertain, is that Hallmark (who owned the Filmation library in the 1990s) possibly did not remaster the special at all when they were remastering Filmation's library for international distribution back in the 1990s, and because of it, the original masters for the special may no longer exist.
- Rugrats had an episode titled "Vacation" that was originally released on videocassette, then broadcast on TV before it mysteriously vanished, and failed to appear on any compilation DVDs for the longest time note . Depending on who you ask, either Nickelodeon was unable to regain clearance to show the song "Vacation" by The Go-Go's in the opening scene, or it could be a particular scene where Siegfried & Roy look-alikes are attacked by their white tigers (especially when you consider that a similar, real-life event happened six years after it was originally shown).
- Pingu has suffered this several times when the series was remastered.
- Originally, "Pingu Looks After the Egg" featured the song "Woodpeckers from Space" from the Dutch group VideoKids. When the entire series was remastered, HiT Entertainment could not get clearance for the song to appear again. As a result, the music was replaced by an instrumental version of David Hasselhoff's "Pingu Dance", which was used as the theme song beginning with Season 3 and replaced the original intro in the remastered versions of Seasons 1 and 2.
- Likewise, "Ice Hockey" had a version of "Hand in Hand", the official song for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Again, HiT Entertainment could not get clearance for this song and replaced it with a random orchestral score.
- "Music Lessons", which introduced Pingu's grandfather, has a strange variation of this. Reportedly, the Pygos Group was sued by an unknown recording company after they discovered that Pygos did not get clearance to use the accordion music that Pingu's grandfather played while offering lessons to Pingu. Although it was released on VHS, the episode was briefly pulled for a while and not shown until it was remastered by HiT and the music was redone. The remastered version is the only version of the episode that is rerun or released on current home video releases.
- Warner Bros. co-produced X-Men: Evolution and was responsible for home media distribution. Although the first three seasons were released to DVD in Region 1 (with the first two being released in the form of four volumes each season), the fourth season has yet to receive such treatment, since the American rights reverted back to Marvel (and all existing DVDs went out-of-print). As of 2022, the series is streaming on Disney+ in the USA and HBO Max in Latin America.
- MGM/UA's plans to release Popeye shorts on home video were put to a screeching halt by a cease-and-desist letter from King Features Syndicate, stating that MGM/UA had no rights to release Popeye material on home video. Even after Turner Entertainment acquired the Popeye cartoon catalog in 1986, it would take up to 2007 for an agreement to finally be reached to officially release the shorts on DVD.note
- Rumors began circulating that the legal issues flared up again after the home media releases were suspended after Volume 3 (which featured Popeye cartoons from the early 1940s) was released. Cartoon historian Jerry Beck later clarified that it was due to the prohibitive cost of having to restore more cartoons, and less to do with legal disputes. Eventually a third volume would be released on Blu-Ray in 2018.
- When Nintendo licensed the Super Mario Bros. game series for animated television, they included a contractual requirement that Bowser be referred to only as "King Koopa". This also applied to other media, including the Live-Action Adaptation movie. By The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, the requirement was softened enough to allow his full name "Bowser Koopa" to be used, though not "Bowser" alone. Illumination Entertainment's The Super Mario Bros. Movie refers Bowser to by his real name, meaning that the mandate was finally lifted at last.
- The Alvin and the Chipmunks Direct to Video film series that began with Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein was killed by a lawsuit between Universal Studios and Chipmunks licensor Bagdasarian Productions over a contract infraction by Universal, not, as some believed, because of under-performing sales of the second movie, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman. A third direct-to-video movie, Little Alvin and the Mini-Munks was made entirely by Bagdasarian. Twentieth Century Fox soon picked up the theatrical rights to Alvin and the Chipmunks afterwards.
- When the complete series of ChalkZone was released on DVD in October 2014, the set did not include the season two episode "The Smooch" due to music licensing issues- the episode included the Baha Men's cover of "Coconut", and the song was too important to the plot to edit out. Due to the same reasons, the episode was also left off of the episode collections on iTunes and Amazon Instant Video. Fortunately, the DVDs do contain "Power Play" and "All The Way To The Top", which were paired up with the episode (as the show's other releases didn't include them at all). The episode remained in the rerun rotation until 2013 when Nicktoons took the show off of their schedule. Whether or not it will appear in reruns again is unknown.
- Class of 3000 is often mistaken for being an example this. A man named Timothy McGee sued Andre 3000 for copyright infringement, stating that he had pitched a similar series in 1997 called "The Music Factory of the 90's" to the network; the lawsuit was eventually thrown out for several reasons — Music Factory was targeted at adults, far more grounded in reality, and McGee was acting as if he invented the idea of a music-based animated series — but having to go to court over the show wasn't a factor in the show getting cancelled. The series had actually ended production a year prior due to budgetary constraints and other production issues that the show's ratings couldn't justify.
- The most likely factor in Johnny Test's second cancellation. According to TV producer David Straiton, he and Scott Fellows created the concept for Johnny Test back in 1996 and unsuccessfully pitched it to a number of networks. Years later, he found out that Fellows got the show on TV without crediting or paying Straiton, so Straiton sued him for fraud and accounting malfeasance. However, the show got a Netflix revival in 2021, still helmed by Fellows, meaning the lawsuit was eventually settled at some point before production on the revival began.
- The New Scooby-Doo Movies DVD set was missing nine of the 24 episodes either because Warner Home Video couldn't get clearances from those episodes' guest stars (Phyllis Diller, Jerry Reed) or couldn't afford to pay an extra license to use crossover characters (Addams Family, Josie and the Pussycats). This was mostly cleared up in 2019 when Warner released a Blu-ray set of 23 of the 24 episodes, with a standalone DVD set with the 8 recently-cleared episodes. The only episode still unavailable on home video is "Wednesday is Missing," allegedly because these releases came out as MGM was about to release their new Addams Family film, leading to possible brand conflict.
- This is the reason why most Nickelodeon Rewind merchandise excludes Doug from anything. When The Walt Disney Company bought the show in 1996 (via their purchase of Jumbo Pictures, the company who made the show), they were given the rights to use Doug's image on merchandise and other promotional material. Nick still owns their episodes and their video rights (as well as promotional material such as stock art used before the Disney buyout), but overall very rarely use Doug on '90s Nick-oriented merchandise as they have to ask Disney for permission most of the time.
- Because KaBlam! had a number of episodes that featured music videos for real songs (usually by They Might Be Giants), as well as the opening being a Real Song Theme Tune ("2-Tone Army" by The Toasters- a few of their other songs were used for the show's ending themes, the eyecatch, and background music), the show is currently the only Nicktoon from the '90s to not receive a home media release, has not aired in regular repeats since 2005, and is barely acknowledged by Nick themselves anymore (possibly to avoid having to deal with all of the music rights). Oddly, this was assumed to be the case with the individual shorts (especially with Angela Anaconda and Untalkative Bunny, which were spun-off into their own series by different companies), however numerous creators of the shorts have stated that Nick owns all the shorts produced, including the ones that were made into their own shows not owned by Viacom (so all Nick would own are the original shorts for them). This excludes the Lava shorts as they were produced by a different company, though all post-2000 reruns cut the shorts from the episodes they were in.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- The character Starlight Glimmer was originally named Aurora Glimmer until an angry letter from Disney led to the name change.
- Due to issues with the Chanel estate, Coco Pommel had her name changed to Miss Pommel in the merchandise and her last major appearance in Season 6. Afterwards, she was relegated to the background.
- Nurse Redheart's cutie mark was subtly changed from a red cross to a white cross with a heart in it or a purple cross, depending on the work, in order to avoid issues with the Red Cross who have begun more fiercely defending the symbol, whose unauthorized usage is illegal under US, Canadian, and international law, as well as banned by the Geneva Convention.
- This is believed to be the reason why Barbie and Ken aren't in Toy Story of Terror or Toy Story That Time Forgot (although Barbie does appear in Toy Story 4 in a flashback sequence). After the release of Toy Story 3, the rights to produce Barbie theatrical films were acquired by Sony, and so Disney and Pixar couldn't use the characters during the time of the spin-off films.
- Until the mess with the great number of clips from other TV shows and movies is sorted out, it could be quite a while before Muppet Babies (1984) gets re-released on Region 1 DVD or Blu-ray. Some sources state that those clips were licensed with future use in mind, making the situation unclear.
- In October 2020, Jeffrey Scott, the developer of the original 1984 Muppet Babies series, sued Disney for copyright infringement and fraud, saying that they didn't offer him a chance to work on the 2018 reboot or pay him for his original ideas. Fortunately, it didn't stop season 3 from premiering in January of 2021, but it did result in it being on the Disney Junior sub-channel instead of the Disney Junior block on Disney Channel. On April 1st, 2021, a federal judge threw out the case.
- The pre-October 1950 Noveltoons will likely take a while to get an official home video release as Paramount sorts out royalty issues over the use of the characters in the shorts (Paramount owns those shorts, while all the shorts from that point until 1962 are owned by Universal, who owns the characters in question). These issues, ironically, were the result of Paramount's own folly, having sold the characters and the post-October 1950-1962 cartoons to Harvey Comics, which Universal now owns.note
- Paramount pulled stupid moves even during animation's golden age. A huge example of this was when Paramount approached Marjorie Henderson Buell, owner of Little Lulu, as their contract for animated shorts was set to expire in 1947. Paramount demanded that Marge relinquish the rights to Little Lulu or they'll stop producing cartoons. Marge didn't take it well; the contract was not renewed and Paramount had to create a knockoff replacement, Little Audrey. Both characters were eventually bought out by Universal.
- UK fans of South Park had to wait the better part of a decade between the releases of Seasons 4 and 5 of the show, due to a poorly negotiated home video contract that gave initial UK broadcasters Channel 4 a ten-year deal on all VHS and DVD releases. When Comedy Central pulled Channel 4's broadcasting license for the show and started showing it on their own UK channel, Channel 4 retaliated by sitting on the home video rights for several years, forcing Comedy Central to wait until the deal had expired and they could release it under their own brand.
- This is the reason why the Dragon Tunes segments of Dragon Tales haven't been seen since 2010, due to issues to the legal rights to the songs. It also might be a factor in it being one of three shows (the other two being Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat and Big Bag) from Sesame Workshop not to rerun on HBO (Sony co-owning the series doesn't help). However, when it was on Netflix, each episode was put on there as individual stories to avoid problems with Dragon Tunes.
- Robinson Sucroe, originally released in 1994, got screwed over by the discovery that the idea was plagiarized from The Adventures of Robinson Curiosity, a proposed idea for a series pitched to Cookie Jar Entertainment (then known as Cinar) by Claude Robinson. When the show started airing on Canadian TV one year later, Claude sued Cinar for plagiarizing Robinson Curiosity and, after a lengthy legal battle, won the case in August 2009, barring the show from getting any further reruns or home media releases.
- Hanna-Barbera's animated series of The Little Rascals is unlikely to see a U.S. home video release or cable reruns for two reasons: One is the ownership dispute between CBS (which acquired King World) and Warner Bros., and the other is Eugene "Porky" Lee's lawsuit against Hanna-Barbera, alleging unauthorized use of his likeness.
- Thanks to Disney and MGM both claiming ownership of the series, RoboCop: The Animated Series remains unavailable on DVD in the US, leaving those who want to check the series out to track down the hard-to-find VHS volumes or the taped original broadcasts. As for why Disney's involved, the show was produced by Marvel Productions, whose library is owned by Disney, and the show is considered part of the library. The RoboCop IP itself is owned by MGM via Orion Pictures, who licensed the franchise to Marvel in the late 80s and early 90s.
- In the Japanese dub of PAW Patrol, Ryder is named Kent. The reason why is because Takara Tomy, who distributes The Merch in Japan, wanted to copyright Ryder's name, but their rival, Bandai, had copyrighted the Japanese spelling, "raida", for the names of the warriors in Toei's Kamen Rider series. Surprisingly, this didn't affect the Japanese release of Frozen II, which also featured a character named Ryder, possibly because various companies had the rights to The Merch for that movie, including Bandai, who makes the toys for Kamen Rider, especially that there was only a few merch for the latter Ryder.
- Nickelodeon's promos for Rainbow Butterfly Unicorn Kitty referred it to RBUK, and when it aired on the network, the show's theme song was abridged to remove the show's title. This may have to do with behind-the-scenes legal threats from both Warner Bros. and LEGO, the creators of Unikitty!, a spin-off of The LEGO Movie, feeling that the show's premise and main character are rip-offs of theirs. Ironically enough, the concept of a rainbow butterfly unicorn kitty predates both shows.
- Vampirina is based off a series of children's books called Vampirina Ballerina. The shortened title for the Animated Adaptation is likely because Disney didn't want to get sued by Mattel for having a show whose title spoofs Angelina Ballerina.
- This affected The Transformers, due to Hasbro signing on toys from just about every line they could get their hands on when their Japanese partner Takara decided they wanted to air the show in their markets as well. Takara put the kibosh on any characters based on toys owned by competing companies appearing in the show, and as a result, the Deluxe Insecticons and Deluxe Vehicles, among others, became Toyline Exclusive Characters. One character created particular problems with this, as Jetfire had a big expensive toy and episodes featuring him were already in production—despite the fact that he was a Macross Valkyrie, a toy very much owned by Bandai. As a result, Hasbro redesigned Jetfire's cartoon design completely to the point of looking nothing like his toy, changed his name to "Skyfire" for good measure, and had him vanish from the show a third of the way through the second season.
- The Disney Junior Nursery Rhymes and Disney Junior Ready for Preschool segments do not feature any of the PJ Masks characters or any Bluey characters. Even though both are popular on the channel, Disney does not own the IP rights to both shows, and they aren't interested in paying Hasbro/Entertainment One, Ludo Studio, and BBC Studios royalties to use the characters in the segments, especially compared to Nick Jr. which glady licensed characters from both PAW Patrol, and Peppa Pig, two properties they do not own, for their Noggin segments like Noggin Presents Word Play and for Noggin Originals.
- A Schoolhouse Rock! segment about weather got pulled in 1987 because it was called "The Greatest Show On Earth", something that Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus objected to. It would later appear on the 30th anniversary DVD.
- Warner Bros. has released manufacture-on-demand DVD sets for the entirety of Challenge of the GoBots in three volumes (the first consisting of the Five-Episode Pilot, the second consisting of the next 30 episodes and the third consisting of the remaining 30 episodes) due to being the current rights owners like most other Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but have yet to provide a contemporary home media release for The Movie GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords because the film was originally distributed by Clubhouse Pictures, whose library was inherited by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after going defunct. This means that Warner Bros. can't give Battle of the Rock Lords a home media release without working out licensing issues with co-owner MGM.
- SpongeBob SquarePants:
- For a while, home video releases excluded the show's very first episode, "Help Wanted", because of licensing issues with the song "Living in the Sunlight" by Tiny Tim, until it was released on the Season 3 and the First 100 Episodes DVD Sets with the song left intact.
- The reason King Neptune's design was completely different in The Movie was because of a "firewall" between Nickelodeon and Paramount that prevented certain elements from the show from appearing in the movie and vice versa for 15 years.
- Star Trek: The Animated Series had an unusual case of this going forward (and not just because both Gene Roddenberry and Paramount declared TAS to be non-canon, only for CBS to reverse that policy). One episode, "The Slaver Weapon", featured the Kzinti, an alien race created by episode writer Larry Niven for his Known Space book series. As a result, they were absent from the rest of the franchise (excluding Star Fleet Battles) for decades thanks to legal issues stemming from this, and multiple attempts to bring them back either floundered because of said legal restrictions, or because of other issues (ie. a planned appearance in season 5 of Star Trek: Enterprise, before the show was Cut Short). Star Trek Online featured an Expy race known as the Ferasan instead. The legalities were finally worked out in the late 2010s, which enabled Star Trek: Lower Decks to feature a Kzinti ensign onboard the Cerritos (as well as a general reference to the race in Star Trek: Picard).
- The main reason why copyright lengths had extended in 1976 and 1998 were because Disney was desperate to keep Steamboat Willie out of the Public Domain. And even when they did finally give up and allow the short to slip into it, they still would file copyright claims on YouTube videos featuring that short's design of Mickey Mouse.
- In the spring of 2021, Mattel began taking down and/or blocking various Thomas & Friends-related videos on YouTube. This treatment even extended to uploads of foreign dubs of the series, as well as episodes of Shining Time Station, the spin-off that introduced North American audiences to Thomas. This is mainly for the classic series (the first seven seasons).
- Disney had lost its license of Rolie Polie Olie to Nelvana, which produced the series. The series was added to Disney+ in September 2021 (it's likely that Disney and Nelvana both made a deal to put the series on the service).
- The Arthur special Arthur, It's Only Rock and Roll has rarely been seen since it premiered because of the use of songs by the Backstreet Boys, who guest star in the special. This is also possibly the reason why Cookie Jar Entertainment did not plaster their logo over CINAR's logo during the time they were around, making it the only Cinar-era Arthur production to retain the CINAR logo.
- The Ren & Stimpy Show:
- According to Bob Camp, some episodes of the show are not on Paramount+ due to rights issues with Raymond Scott's music.
- According to Sick Little Monkeys, part of the reason why "Man's Best Friend" ended up getting banned was because of this. While Nickelodeon was originally planning to reanimate the infamous scene of Ren beating up George Liquor with an oar into something less violent, they couldn't air the episode at all because when John Kricfalusi was fired, he was allowed to take the rights to George Liquor with him.
- The first three Merrie Melodies cartoonsnote featured a character named Foxy, who was a blatant clone of Mickey Mouse. Disney caught wind of it and ordered Harman and Ising to get rid of the character or they'd sue. In response, Foxy was replaced by a less blatant knock-off named Piggy.
- In the early 2000's, the first two seasons of Adventures from the Book of Virtues got a redub in Singapore that used local voice actors because of this trope, as it would be cheaper to redub the show rather than paying royalties to the Celebrity Voice Actors present in the original versions. Because of this, the Singaporean version is the only one of the first two seasons legally available to this day.
- If one attempts to tune into the PBS Kids channel on Samsung-branded TVs during Curious George, an error message is displayed redirecting viewers to watch the show on the app instead. This is because of Peacock owning the streaming rights to the show. As of June 2023, the PBS Kids app also displays a similar message during airings of Curious George.
- This managed to happen to Mission Hill regarding music. Twice.
- The first was when it was still on television. Originally the clip of the drunken dudebros taking over the Ivy League was cut to a clip of Rock And Roll Part 2. Either they lost the rights or never had them at all, because the music was soon changed: it was still the recognizable tune, but it lacked the distinct HEY that most know the song for which was apparently good enough to satisfy a lawyer.
- When it was released to DVD, they had by then lost all the rights to almost all the music in the entire series. The show fell victim to some rather noticeable and badly done Clumsy Copyright Censorship where songs were replaced with royalty-free alternatives: the audio mixing was poor and it often didn't match the volume of the episode or drowned out dialogue, a very noticeable replacement of Andy saying "Scott Joplin" instead of "Gordon Lightfoot" which sticks out like a sore thumb because it was taken from a different episode rather than getting Wallace Langham to re-record the line, and it even caused a Plot Hole where one of the replaced songs was plot-relevant.
- Played for Laughs on one episode of Solar Opposites, when Aisha is telling the aliens about the fates of all the other teams from Planet Schlorp. She claims one team was killed by the Superman, but she can't show that clip because of legal reasons.
- This almost happened with The Flintstones, but it was ultimately averted. When Jackie Gleason saw the show, he (along with virtually everyone else who watched it) immediately realized that it was "The Honeymooners with cave people," and he seriously considered suing Hanna-Barbera to stop production. However, Gleason knew that if he succeeded, he'd Never Live It Down and forever be remembered as "the guy who yanked Fred Flintstone off the air." As such, he left the cartoon alone and preserved his reputation (which by all accounts worked).
- Van Beuren Studios' Milton Mouse character existed as early as 1921, but in 1929 he and his girlfriend Rita got substantial redesigns to resemble Mickey and Minnie Mouse, respectively. Walt himself watched the short The Office Boy in a theatre and was outraged, and sued Van Beuren. While Van Beuren's lawyers asserted that Milton actually predated Mickey, Disney still won the lawsuit because it was obvious that Milton was redesigned specifically to bank on Mickey's popularity. As a result, Van Beuren cooked up a less blatant Captain Ersatz named Cubby Bear.
