Legal Question in Entertainment Law in California

Re: I am interested in revising an existing copyrighted character

Your first step should be to engage an experienced entertainment attorney to represent you and act as your intermediary with the copyright owner. Although California law does offer some protection to ideas (copyright law does not), only a copyright owner has the right to make derivative works.

If you want to sell your idea to the current owner, you will, of course, need to convince the owner that you have a workable idea (and will have to disclose some of what you have planned). Ideally, before making disclosures you will want to have some sort of nondisclosure/confidentiality agreement in place--but often entertainment companies will not sign such an agreement. If you have an attorney doing the submission and negotiations on your behalf, a production company is less likely to steal your idea without paying you something.

If you want to develop the idea yourself, you may not need to disclose specifics of your idea, but would need to work out some sort of license arrangement with the copyright owner. Again, you should have an attorney assist you and negotiate on your behalf.

A good entertainment or intellectual property attorney can advise you about the best approach to take once he/she knows the specifics of what you have in mind. The money you spend on an attorney now will be much less than you will spend later to sue to enforce your rights, particularly if your idea is successful.