Shepard’s accompanying line drawings are free to use. With the exception of the character Tigger, who first appears in Milne’s 1928 book The House at Pooh Corner, the plot, dialogue, and characters from the 1926 story as well as E.H.

Jenkins is closely watching if the Walt Disney Corporation, which owns the billion-dollar Winnie the Pooh franchise, will attempt to block independent creators from adapting the fictional bear in new works. After a decades-long legal tussle between Disney and the Slesinger heirs … Disney prevailed and officially owns the Winnie the Pooh copyrights and trademarks. This evolution into a lucrative franchise began when Milne sold certain rights to the literary agent and “father of the licensing industry” Stephen Slesinger in 1930.Īfter Slesinger’s death some of the Pooh rights were transferred by his heirs to Disney, who removed the hyphens from “Winnie-the-Pooh” and expanded the media and merchandising Pooh-niverse. So far, it has brought in a total of 80.3 billion dollars worldwide. In 2021 Statista estimated that Winnie the Pooh ranked #3 in the top-grossing media franchises of all time, behind only Pokemon and Hello Kitty and tied with Mickey Mouse. Winnie the Pooh is a money-minting property for Disney: They have shown a willingness to drag people through the court system to keep control of properties of theirs which have fallen into public domain. has owned the rights to the writing and the illustrations for quite some time, and it won’t be easy to wrest control from them. Decades of recordings made from the advent of sound recording technology through the end of 1922-estimated at some 400,000 works-will be open for legal reuse. On January 1 2022, the gates will open for all of the recordings that have been waiting in the wings. What’s more, for the first time ever, thanks to a 2018 law called the Music Modernization Act, a special category of works- sound recordings-will finally begin to join other works in the public domain. Milne, the first published novels from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, the first books of poems from Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker. In 2022, the public domain will welcome a lot of “firsts”: the first Winnie-the-Pooh book from A. In 2022 we get a bonus: an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 will be entering the public domain too! (Please note that this site is only about US law the copyright terms in other countries are different.) There are scores of silent films-including titles featuring Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Greta Garbo, famous Broadway songs, and well-known jazz standards.

Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Felix Salten’s Bambi, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues, and Dorothy Parker’s Enough Rope. On January 1, 2022, copyrighted works from 1926 will enter the US public domain, where they will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon.

All the Funny Folks by Jack Lait