SpectrumTalk

Is FCC Stealing Someone Else's Intellectual Property?

I was surfing over to Wikipedia the other day and glanced at the FCC article. I was surprised to see the following text:

"Doraemon

The character "Broadband" (FCC Kids Zone) looks like Doraemon, a popular manga character in Japan. Doraemon was created for print in magazines in 1969, which makes Doraemon predate the FCC's character. According to Japanese news media, both Shogakukan (copyright manager) and Fujiko-production (owner of the copyright) have warned the FCC over the alleged copyright infringement, but so far there has been no answer."

You can see above what "Broadband" looks like. In addition to the links in the article, this link will get you directly to the Google images pages for Doraemon images. So you can decide for yourself.

I suspect the problem is that FCC does most web work inhouse, but contracts out for special web projects like Kids Zone. The contractor may have cut corners by getting to close to the Japanese character. I doubt if FCC has the resources to modify the page if it was done by a contractor. It would be nice if they answered the inquiries from Japan. Perhaps they have already, in which case maybe they should amend the Wikipedia article with a factual update.

As mentioned previously, the FCC website has a ton of information but most of it is hard to find due to poor organization. The site's search engine also is obsolete, complicating usage of the site.