Congratulations, Universal. You played yourself.

The history of King Kong's intellectual property status is messy and complicated, but for now, I'm going to focus on two particular incidents. In 1975, Universal Studios was fighting against Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis over which of them would be able to produce a remake of the original 1933 movie. When De Laurentiis bought the remake rights from RKO Pictures, Universal sued RKO, claiming to have had a verbal agreement with them regarding the remake. One fact that remains comparatively obscure to this day is that a novelization of the 1933 movie written by Delos W. Lovelace was published *before* the movie's release, and during the legal battles that ensued, Universal discovered that the novelization's copyright had expired. Universal argued that this meant the story's characters were in the public domain within the context of the novelization, and Judge Manuel Real ruled that, while the rights to the name character and story of King Kong outside the original film and its sequel were held by the estate of filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, the novelization and serialization were indeed in the public domain. Colonel Richard Cooper, Merian's son and his successor as the head of the Cooper estate, sold most of his rights to Universal in December 1976.

This decision came back to bite Universal when, in 1982, they sued Nintendo, claiming that Donkey Kong was a trademark infringement of King Kong; they did this partly because they had agreed to license the rights to King Kong to Coleco. However, Nintendo's lawyer John Kirby not only argued that there were clear differences between Donkey Kong and King Kong, but also that Universal themselves had proven that King Kong's plot and characters were in the public domain in their previous legal battles over the remake rights. Judge Robert W. Sweet ruled in favor of Nintendo, Universal was eventually punished for having acted in bad faith, and Nintendo thanked Kirby by giving him $30,000 sailboat christened the Donkey Kong, along with "exclusive worldwide rights to use the name for sailboats". The title character of Nintendo's Kirby franchise was named after him, and rumor has it that that a copy of Kirby's Dream Land, the first game in the franchise, was eventually sent to John Kirby.