The legal goings-on this week regarding Peanuts require a bit of a preface: while Peanuts Worldwide (or really Peanuts Holdings) owns Peanuts, they don’t own everything Peanuts. Lee Mendelson Film Productions has rights regarding the classic TV and film material. If I understand correctly (and that’s a real caveat, there are so many things in this world that I don’t understand), they own the rights to all that great Vince Guaraldi music, both the rights to the compositions (i.e., what you see when you see sheet music) and the recordings. If you license the rights to Peanuts to make a product, you don’t automatically get to use the tune “Linus and Lucy” in it, you have to license that separately. Now, this is a valuable pile of music. Not only is it quite recognizable, but the soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas keeps returning to the record charts whenever Christmastime is here.

This week LMFP launched a batch of lawsuits aimed at folks that they feel had infringed upon their rights, often in social media postings, where people and corporations often act as if intellectual property ain’t a real thing. They sued Heritage Auctions, who have sold many, many pieces of Peanuts art. They went after Buckle-Down, Inc., who make licensed Peanuts belts, bags, guitar straps, and other items (my daughter got me a nice wallet as a gift recently.) They went after the makers of the game Snoopy & the Great Mystery Club (reviewed here) not for using the actual copyrighted music but for music that sounded so much like it that LMFP saw it as infringing.

Perhaps most notably, they went after the Trump administration, specifically the Department of the Interior. The DOI had used the song “O Tannenbaum” in an online video, and while that tune is an old one and in the public domain, specific recordings of it falls under copyright, and LMFP feels this is the sort of usage for which people should pay.

In the wake of this, known Peanuts fan and occasional Snoopy drawer Stephen Colbert discussed this on the final episode Late Night with Stephen Colbert… and given that Colbert’s show was dumped under the pretense of expense but with the strong sense that it was largely just CBS giving in to presidential bullying, the show’s band played a bit of “Linus and Lucy” with full knowledge that it may end up costing the network some dough. (Hat tip to Mediaite.)

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