Academic

Disney Buying Online Businesses?

By Jacqueline Lipton

A colleague recently mentioned Disney's acquisition last year of a small online "green" company, idealbite.com.  This company specializes in providing tips about maintaining an eco-friendly lifestyle.  Apparently, Disney paid $20 million for the company.  The only information I could find about Disney's motivations was that Idealbite's customer base comprises a demographic that Disney is interested in - described by cnet reporter Caroline McCarthy as follows:  "The site's median household income is $82,000...; the median age is 35; and the target demographic is the sort that "drinks organic wine after yoga." In other words, yuppie moms."

If Disney is interested in Idealbite's customer base, does it actually have any legal rights to access customer information from its subsidiary?  I briefly scanned through Idealbite's privacy policy and its terms and conditions of use.  The privacy policy is pretty minimalist while the terms of use give Idealbite powerful contractual licenses and IP protections over all content on their website, including most content posted by customers.  So I guess Disney can probably take what it wants.   This kind of online data mining obviously isn't a new issue, but Disney and the online green folks seem  to be strange bedfellows, so it's an unusual case in point.

In other Disney acquisition news, there were also rumors last year that Disney had purchased or planned to purchase the controversial online fan fiction site, Fanlib.com.  Since those rumors died down - and it remains unclear whether Disney completed the purchase - Fanlib.com has quietly gone out of business.  It is not clear whether Disney's purpose in acquiring Fanlib was to protect its own IP rights in content by closing down the fan fiction site, or whether Disney was rather interested in Fanlib's proprietary crowd-writing software.  If the former, wouldn't it have been cheaper just to send a cease and desist letter?  I'd be interested to find out if anyone has any additional background on this one.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on February 25, 2009 (boomark / email).