[3] Air Pirates founder Dan O'Neill wanted the comic to be noticed by the Disney company and arranged for copies to be smuggled into board meetings.

[5] Tens of thousands of copies of Air Pirates Funnies, and an associated comic called The Tortoise and the Hare that featured the same characters, were seized under a court order in 1972.

[2] The court rejected the Air Pirates' claim of fair use for satirical purposes, because the depictions of the characters at issue were indistinguishable from Disney's originals.

[1] At the Circuit Court, the Air Pirates added a free speech claim with an argument that copyright infringement lawsuits against satires and parodies would chill public discussion.

The court rejected this argument under the rationale that the Air Pirates could have expressed their opinions about the Disney company without confusingly similar depictions of its characters.

Law professor Edward Samuels was skeptical of O'Neill's defiant strategy and later concluded that the saga "set parody back twenty years".

[9][10] The case also resulted in the Disney company gaining a possibly unfair reputation for excessive use of copyright law, though the saga raised awareness of the need for a balance between the interests of rights holders and the creative impulses of satirists.