Interesting use of Bayesian inference to prove the brothers Grimm were mostly plagiarists
If you want a villain, consider Disney who tried (sometimes successfully in the US) to exert control of the use of fairytales by other parties after they'd made a film of one.
What Disney has done is sued over trademark claims on Snow White, Beauty and the Beast etc, trying to claim proprietary ownership of public domain stories, characters and ideas.
Theese suits were expensive and not always successful so they eventually decided to stop explicitly mining the past and start developing their own characters (e.g. mermaid etc).
You can't trademark a story or idea, but you can trademark a particular character design. You can make your own Cinderella interpretation as long as you don't copy the exact art and design made by someone else.
Quote:
"According to scholars such as Ruth Bottigheimer and Maria Tatar, some of the tales probably originated in written form during the medieval period with writers such as Straparola and Boccaccio, but were modified in the 17th century and again rewritten by the Grimms. Moreover, Tatar writes that the brothers' goal of preserving and shaping the tales as something uniquely German at a time of French occupation was a form of "intellectual resistance" and, in so doing, they established a methodology for collecting and preserving folklore that set the model followed later by writers throughout Europe during periods of occupation."