This Bear’s For You! (Or, Is It?) Can Companies Use Copyright and Trademark To Claim Rights to Public Domain Works?; Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain

Jennifer Jenkins, Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain; This Bear’s For You! (Or, Is It?)

Can Companies Use Copyright and Trademark To Claim Rights to Public Domain Works?

"The original Winnie-the-Pooh book from 1926 is in the public domain. However, Disney still owns copyrights over later works, and trademark rights for “Winnie the Pooh” on a variety of products. Hopefully they will not follow the example of the Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, or Zorro rights holders and try to use residual rights to prevent what copyright expiation allows. This could lead to unnecessary litigation, and even the threat of lawsuits could chill the creative reuse the public domain is designed to promote.

In fact, Disney’s own beloved works show just how valuable the public domain is. Many of its animated classics were remakes of public domain books and folk tales. Works from Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, The Brothers Grimm, Victor Hugo, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, Carlo Collodi, Mark Twain, English folklore, and The Book of One Thousand and One Nights fed Disney’s The Three Muskateers, A Christmas Carol, Beauty and the Beast, Around the World in 80 Days, Alice in Wonderland, Snow White, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Pinocchio, Huck Finn, Robin Hood, and Aladdin, to name a few. When it got into a dispute with the rightsholders of Bambi, Disney even filed an unsuccessful lawsuit claiming that the book had gone into the public domain much earlier. Let us hope that Disney remembers its own debt to the public domain when Pooh, and later the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse, enter the realm from which it has drawn so heavily!"