Disney, which was apparently a major driving force behind the Copyright Term Extension Act’s retroactive extension of preexisting copyrights — Mickey Mouse was about to fall in the public domain, and now Disney has 20 more years of monopoly over him — is apparently in some trouble because of that very Act:
“Peter and the Starcatchers” by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson and published by Disney’s Hyperion Books is billed as a prequel to the children’s classic, “Peter Pan.”
Great Ormond Street [hospital for children] was left the royalties to Peter Pan in 1929 by the author, J.M. Barrie . . . . This weekend sees the UK premiere of a film about Barrie’s life, “Finding Neverland” — starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet and Dustin Hoffman. The hospital will receive royalties from book excerpts portrayed in the film.
But the hospital charity says is getting nothing from “Peter and the Starcatchers” . . . . They say the book has been published without its permission.
A spokesman for the hospital told CNN that Great Ormond Street held the copyright to Peter Pan in the United States until 2023 — although it runs out in EU countries in 2007 — and said: “We are considering our options.”
Disney, meanwhile, has insisted that Peter Pan is out of copyright in the United States.
“The copyright to the J.M. Barrie stories expired in the U.S. prior to 1998, the effective date of the U.S. Copyright Extension Act, and thus were ineligible for any extension of their term,” Disney said in a statement to the Daily Telegraph. . . .
I’m pretty sure that Disney is right: Peter Pan was apparently published from 1902 to 1911 (there were different versions), so even if we use the latest date, 1911, the book fell into the public domain in the U.S. 75 years late, in 1986. (At the time, the term of protection was, more or less, the author’s life plus 50 years for works written in 1978 or later, or 75 years for works published before 1978.) The Copyright Term Extension Act didn’t revive the copyrights on such works, though it did extend — inappropriately, in my view — those copyrights that were still in effect. Unless I’m missing something here, the hospital would have no case.
So Disney should be off the hook, as should others who want to build on Peter Pan. That’s good, for the same reason that it’s good that we have a rich public domain full of other works (Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens, and so on) that people can reinterpret, adapt, and republish. There would have been some poetic justice in Disney’s being stuck with the consequences of its earlier lobbying, especially since Disney, like other authors and employers of authors, has so often taken advantage of a rich public domain in making its work. But at first glance, it looks like Disney’s source material in this instance is indeed in the public domain, despite the Term Extension Act.
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