 |
|
Disney is fighting Stephen Slesinger Inc. over rights to Winnie the Pooh, using the 1998 copyright law (Sonny Bono strikes again!) that allows heirs of copyrighted works to reclaim the rights within two years of giving notice to existing owners. This is the latest turn in the battle between Disney and Slesinger over rights to Pooh. Slesinger, which bought the rights from the estate of Pooh creator A.A. Milne in 1929 and then licensed them to Disney in 1961, claims Disney didn’t pay all the royalties owed on the characters.
Now Disney says the heirs to the Milne and Shepard (Pooh's Illustrator) estates came to it wanting to make a deal to get the character rights back and reassign them in full to Disney. Slesinger thinks this use of the copyright law is just a way to get around the issues at hand: that Disney owes Slesinger money and doesn't want to end the Pooh gravy train.
The previous Pooh copyright history is lengthy, and Pooh won't go into the public domain until 2026. In the meanwhile, it makes Disney $4 billion a year.
(You can imagine the headline puns over the latest dispute: Pooh hits the Fan.)
Posted by Mary Hodder at November 05, 2002 07:37 PMThe U.S. copyright on Pooh has been in the public domain since the late 1920s, according to many legal opinions solicited by Disney as early as the 1940s.
The Uruguay Rounds may not have cured this problem. Disney for years has concealed this fact from licensees who have paid for Disney's pretense that it had rights to grant. Instead of licensing Pooh as a trademark, most of Disney's licenses purported to license the copyright.