Trademarks are distinctive signs or symbols used by a person or company to promote and differentiate their products and services from the competitors. They typically consist of a name, word, phrase, logo, or combination of the four, and are distinctly associated with their brand. See the article on the subject for an in-depth explanation.

Trademarks belong to a category called "intellectual property rights", alongside similar concepts called copyrights and patents. A full discussion of their definitions and purpose is beyond the scope of this entry (we have a separate comprehensive article explaining how trademarks works, click here for details), but the three terms all bear a common theme: They acknowledge creation or ownership of something and provide the owner with some control over how it gets used. If somebody else attempts to use it commercially without the owner's permission (often with an exchange of money involved for such permission), the owner can take them to court and sue for damages.

Now, in Real Life, there are certain rules and limitations on what does and does not constitute an infringement, and what is and is not eligible for protection under intellectual property rights laws in the first place. These laws are also what (ostensibly) protect independent artists, inventors, and writers from having their work stolen or destroyed by Evil, Inc., Executive Meddling, severely Misaimed Fandom, or having the Serial Numbers Filed Off.

But there are no such limitations or ethical quandaries in fiction! Some corporations (for example, MegaCorp) are so damn powerful and wield so much influence that they can put a stamp of ownership on literally anything. The grass in your front yard? Patented by a gardening company. The morning sunrise? Copyrighted. The name of your favorite pet? A bright sunny day? The word "the"? Yes, them too. If it exists, then somebody, somewhere, has stamped a copyright or trademark upon it, regardless of common sense or reason, and they'll happily send out their Army of Lawyers to collect royalties at even the slightest hint of infringement.

It should be noted that not all copyright and trademark claims are valid; just look at the mess over "Happy Birthday to You!" as an example of a company attempting this and (eventually) failing. Often leads to getting Screwed by the Lawyers.

Related to Stuck on Band-Aid Brand, where a company not only holds the trademark but continually remind people of it. May overlap with Tradesnark™, where words are labelled as trademarks for humorous purposes.

Don't confuse this for tropes that the Walt Disney Company owns at using, such as the Disney Death or Disney Acid Sequence. It's more general and metaphorical than that.

Example subpages:

• Real Life
• Video Games

Other examples:

Real Life Examples:

All joking aside, the Walt Disney Company has taken over a tremendous◊ number of other media companies and properties, including Pixar, Blue Sky Studios, 20th Century Fox (film and television, a catalogue that goes back a century), most of National Geographic, Lucasfilm, almost the entire Marvel Universe, ABC, ESPN, FX Networks, most of Fox Kids (they're just missing Power Rangers... and only because they sold it back to Saban Entertainment in 2010, and even then they're set to produce a Continuity Reboot series for Disney+), The Muppets, and a whole bunch of other things we've probably forgotten. They're the single biggest media company in the world, with an obscene market share in various different segments of the entertainment industry. And they've got a legendary Army of Lawyers. So their perception as a little enthusiastic in asserting their copyrights is not exactly unfounded.

• The Swedish comic character Arne Anka is a cartoon duck with a fondness for drinking, sex, classic literature, and political rants — nothing like your typical Disney character. Disney's lawyers weren't amused and sued his creator Charlie Christensen. At first, Christensen fruitlessly tried to use logical reasoning, saying, "Surely Disney don't hold the right to all cartoon ducks?" Apparently, they believed they did. Christensen ended up solving the problem by changing Arne's look completely so that he didn't look like a duck at all — a look that lasted for a few pages before Arne bought a toy duck beak that he would constantly wear. From then on, whenever Disney's lawyers complained, Christensen could point out that Arne wasn't really a duck; the toy beak just made him look like one. That seemed to satisfy them.
• Howard the Duck also caught Disney's ire for "unauthorised use of duck". But Howard was a Marvel Comics property rather than the creation of an obscure Swedish artist, so Disney fought harder. And they won. Indeed, they got the right to redesign Howard to something they considered no longer infringing. And they gave him a design so horrible that Marvel stopped using the character entirely. That lasted until the Marvel MAX imprint, when they brought him back as a giant rat (which is either a Take That! or a spectacular case of not thinking this through), only returning to duck form in the final issue. Eventually, Disney bought Marvel outright and got Howard with them, so he's even got an ongoing that featured some snark at Disney (Howard's friend Tara Tam wants to go to Orlando, he replies "Who wants to see a bunch of pantless ducks?").
• Disney has a habit of adapting works and then trying to copyright the whole thing themselves. It's led to some odd results (and some predictable consternation from those who criticise the media giant both for their ruthless litigation and cultural imperialism):
  • Universal's Snow White & the Huntsman drew Disney's ire for its resemblance to the 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. However, The Brothers Grimm's version, first printed in 1812, is already in the Public Domain. This means that any story elements from the original were okay, as long as they didn't resemble the things Disney invented for their version. This may be why, when the director claimed at a ComicCon panel that his version has eight dwarfs because Disney insisted he couldn't have seven, it was called an unlikely prospect. (More likely, he was joking.)
  • They tried to copyright the character Peter Pan in the UK, having supplanted JM Barrie's original with their own animated feature. But they found that in the UK, a special bill had given the partial rights to the character in perpetuity to a children's hospital. The hospital doesn't have the right to forbid use of the character, but they do have the right to collect royalties from any work that uses the character in the UK. A win for art, a loss for vulgar capitalism. This is also how Disney failed to block Fox's animated adaptation of the books, Peter Pan & the Pirates.
  • They tried to copyright the title character of their film Alice in Wonderland, but Lewis Carroll's original work was already in the public domain. Indeed, they were still producing their version when they discovered another film based on Carroll's book — a mixture of live-action and Lou Bunin's Stop Motion puppetry, so visually nothing like Disney's version. They sued anyway. This led to a long legal battle during which Disney brazenly claimed to own the rights to the book; no one bought it, and the case was thrown out. But Disney did succeed in forcing Bunin's film into a limited release and relegating it to obscurity. And they periodically kept trying to copyright Alice in random countries like New Zealand.
  • They tried to copyright the title character of Tarzan, but were blocked in several places by the estate of his original creator Edgar Rice Burroughs.
    • Burroughs's estate themselves are also notoriously zealous with their intellectual property to the point that the Ape Man's iconic yell — purportedly first performed by Johnny Weissmuller — is registered by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. as a sound trademark.
  • They tried to copyright the title character of Pinocchio, but only managed to do their own version, with the rights to the literary character written by Carlo Collodi remaining in the public domain. This led to hilarity when Filmation released its 1986 animated film Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night — they sued for copyright infringement, but lost because the work is based on the original book.
  • They were fairly successful with respect to Cinderella, even though the original work is from 1697 (with versions older than that). The same year as the film's release, Estela Films in Spain were trying to release their own animated feature-length adaptation of it and ran into Disney's copyright-fu. They found that Disney had even trademarked the Spanish name of the story, La Cenicienta, forcing them to call it Érase una vez... (Spanish for "Once Upon a Time").
  • They were also fairly successful with Sleeping Beauty, even though it's a really old story and their version also includes some music from the 1889 ballet version by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Mattel's plan for a Barbie adaptation of the ballet was cancelled in part because Disney owns the trademark to "Princess Aurora", even though Mattel weren't even planning for the protagonist to have that name.
• In the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, Disney attempted to trademark "SEAL Team 6" — the name of the military unit who got him — in the hopes of making an NCIS-style show about them on ABC. They ended up withdrawing their request a short time later, and nothing ever came of the idea.
• When deadmau5 filed a trademark on his signature icon, Disney tried to block it on the grounds that it resembled Mickey Mouse's head. Then they piled on the audacity by airing deadmau5's signature song on Re-Micks without license. They ended up settling the case out-of-court.
• In the early production stages of Coco, Disney tried to trademark the phrase "Dia de los Muertos". That's right, they tried to trademark an entire holiday because Pixar was making a movie about it. The Latino community was quite displeased, leading to Chicano cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz drawing a poster of a giant skeletal Mickey with the caption, "It's coming to trademark your cultura." A week later, Disney backed off (presumably after someone from their PR team smacked the legal department upside the head) and claimed they were just trying "to protect any potential title for our film and related activities." Then they hired Alcaraz to work on the film as a consultant.
• Disney's cooperation with Square Enix in the Kingdom Hearts series leads to some interesting battles. Disney owns everything in the game, even original characters like the protagonist Sora; Square Enix only has the characters that appear in their other games like Final Fantasy and The World Ends with You. It culminated in Final Fantasy Record Keeper slapping a ^{© Disney} anywhere remotely related to Kingdom Hearts, making one almost think they were making fun of it. It was a minor miracle that Sora ever made it to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate without Disney resorting to buying Nintendo out.
• Disney is suspected to be the reason why Nintendo doesn't seem to like Uniracers anymore. Shortly after the game's release, Pixar sued Nintendo claiming the game's protagonist bore too much resemblance to the protagonist of their short Red's Dream, and managed to win (in Disney-esque fashion) by convincing the court that Pixar owns all 3D-animated red unicycles. And this was before Disney bought Pixar. Since then, Nintendo chose not to rerelease it for the Virtual Console, Nintendo Switch Online, or the SNES Classic Edition, suggesting Disney is maintaining the grudge. (They were already sour with Nintendo over the poorly-received Super Mario Bros. (1993) movie.)
• Disney prevented the film adaptation of Italian comic Dylan Dog from featuring a white Volkswagen Beetle like the comic did, because Disney owns the rights to the white Beetle. (They bought them to make The Love Bug.)
• Disney succesfully trademarked the phrase "Hakuna Matata" despite being an actual Swahili phrase. This did not sit well with the countries that speak that language, and to this day, Disney is still accused of colonialism and cultural appropiation for doing this.
• Disney's gotten hit with their own medicine a couple of times:
  • When they tried to make Oz the Great and Powerful, they relied on the underlying book series being in the Public Domain. But Disney took a lot of cues from the famous 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, which was owned by Warner Bros.. They had to have constant meetings with the Warner Bros. people to make sure their movie didn't look too much like the original film, haggling over details as the exact shade of green of the Wicked Witch's skin.
  • When trying to release The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, they discovered that WCW/TNA has the trademark to "Shark Boy". The wrestling people must have gotten a nice settlement, considering that the movie came out. (Perhaps as revenge, it's impossible to find Sharkboy wrestling videos on a Google search.) And Disney wound up losing the rights to the film anyway after they sold off Miramax.
• Disney (until 2024 in the U.S.) held a patent on FastPlay, which allows a DVD to automatically start playing the feature presentation after a menu prompt should the viewer do nothing at said prompt - although the patent is still valid in some countries.
• The film adaptation of Stephen King's short story The Monkey had to change the titular toy's instrument from cymbals to a snare drum. Why? Because apparently Disney owns the trademark to the Cymbal-Banging Monkey on account of its memorable role in Toy Story 3.

In-Universe Examples: