LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
Peter Pan, Mickey Mouse, and the Timing of Sonny Bono
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Friday, October 15 @ 00:26:31 EDT Copyright
When people think of the beneficiaries of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, they probably think of Disney. Thanks to Larry Lessig's "Free the Mouse" PR campaign around Eldred v. Ashcroft, Disney's copyright in Steamboat Willy is often thought of as the copyright that Congress wanted to keep from falling into the public domain.

Well, according to this CNN.com story, the shoe is on the other foot when it comes to Peter Pan. A Disney arm published a Peter Pan prequel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson in the belief that Peter Pan has entered the public domain in the U.S. Given that the play was first performed in 1904 and book was first published in 1911 (as Peter and Wendy), Disney's belief seems to be pretty reasonable. (1923 is the earliest plausible cut-off year.)

But no. The British hospital to whom J.M. Barrie gave the royalties from his copyrights has started consulting lawyers to sue Disney for copyright infringement, apparently in the belief that their U.S. copyright runs through 2023. I'm trying to figure out what plausible interpretation of U.S. copyright law and/or sad misunderstanding of U.S copyright law would lead to that computation, and not having much luck.

Adding 95 years to 1929, the year in which Barrie made his donation, would add up -- but the 95-year figure applies only to publication dates, and only to publication dates after 1923. They also use a life-plus-70 calculation to conclude that Barrie's 1937 death provides an E.U. copyright good through 2007 -- but you can only get life-plus-70 under U.S. law for unpublished works or ones published after 1978. A 1904 play and a 1911 novel aren't going to fit into any of these categories.

Lessig loves to praise Walt Disney's innovative use of existing cultural materials in creating modern masterpieces. Peter and the Starcatchers fits squarely in that tradition; if anyone would knows which eras can be borrowed from and which are locked away under copyright, it would be Disney.

 
Related Links
· More about Copyright
· News by James Grimmelmann


Most read story about Copyright:
Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Misreading (?) of law... (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Friday, October 15 @ 03:04:16 EDT
My guess is that their complain isn't based on US law, as you seem to assume... But that's just a guess.


[ Reply to This ]


Re: Peter Pan, Mickey Mouse, and the Timing of Sonny Bono (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Tuesday, October 26 @ 10:54:03 EDT
My guess is that the claim is based upon the stage play rather than the novel. I have read that the stage play version of Peter Pan was published in the US in 1928. If so, it may be under copyright until 2023. The issue then would be whether the new book is a derivative work based upon the stage play. That must be the plaintiff's theory, since the original Peter Pan novel is in the public domain in the US.


[ Reply to This ]


Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
The PHP-Nuke engine on which LawMeme runs is copyright by PHP-Nuke, and is freely available under the GNU GPL.
Everything else is copyright copyright 2002-04 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php



Page Generation: 0.161 Seconds