Kling

Rainbow Brite is a young girl who, with the help of the Color Kids, her magical horse Starlite, and the small furry sprites who mine for sprinkles in the Color Caves, strives to keep color alive in Rainbow Land. Robotman, Stellar, Oops, and Lint are robots from Robot Land who, for some reason, enjoy helping human teenagers play music. Here in Legal Land, a rather joyless dispute has arisen regarding the ownership of the copyrights in the scripts for six animated children’s television specials featuring the Rainbow Brite and Ro-botman characters. The specials were written by Woody Kling and produced and broadcast in the mid-1980s. Proceeding on the assumption that Mary Kling, Woody Kling’s widow and successor in in *1032 terest, owns these copyrights, we are asked to decide whether the doctrine of laches bars her from filing in 1997 a claim for infringement based on infringing conduct that began in 1985 but may not have come to either of the Klings’ attention prior to 1994. The district court granted the defendants summary judgment, holding that Woody Kling’s failure to sue for a declaration of ownership within a reasonable time following July 17, 1985, when he learned that one of…