The copyright conundrum
What a murderous Winnie the Pooh can tell us about the public domain, remix culture
LOS ANGELES » The giant stuffed bear, its face a t wisted smile, lumbers across the screen. Menacing music swells. Shadows mask unknown threats. Christopher Robin begs for his l ife. And is t hat a sledgehammer about to pulverize a minor character’s head?
Thus unfolds t he t railer for the 2023 m ovie “Winnie t he Pooh: Blood and Honey,” a slasher- film riff on A. A. Milne’s beloved characters, brought to you by ... the expiration of copyright and the arrival of the classic children’s novel into the American public domain.
We were already living in an era teeming with remixes and repurposing, f an fictions a nd mashups. Then began a parade of characters and stories, led by Winnie t he P ooh and Mickey Mouse with many more to follow, marching into t he public domain, where anyone can do anything w ith anything a nd shape it into a new generation of stories and ideas.
After a two- decade drought brought on by congressional extensions of the copyright period in 1998, works again began entering the public domain — becoming available for use without licensing or payment — in 2019. The public began to notice in 2022, when Winnie the Pooh was freed for use as the 95- year copyright period elapsed on the novel that introduced him.
That m ade possible “Blood and Honey” — not to mention a sequel that dropped last month, a forthcoming third and plans for a “Poohniverse” of twisted public domain c haracters including Bambi and Pinocchio. Pooh going public was followed this y ear by a moment many thought would never come: the copyright expiration on the original version of Mickey Mouse, as he appeared in the 1928 Walt Disney short, “Steamboat Willie.”
The mouse and the bear are but the beginning. The heights of 20th century pop culture — Superman a mong t hem — lie ahead.
Classic characters, new stories, fresh mashups. Will it be all be a bonanza for makers? Are we entering a heyday of crossgenerational collaboration or a plummet in i ntellectual property values as audiences get sick of seeing variations of the same old stories?
Does a murderous Pooh bear have something to show the 21st century entertainment world?
Could this make a big difference?
Films from Hollywood’s early talkie e ra h ave started to b ecome public. King Kong, who has one of h is e normous feet in t he p ublic domain already
because of c omplications between companies that own a piece of h im, will shed his remaining chains in 2029. Then, in the 2030s, Superman will soar into the public domain, followed in quick succession by Batman, t he Joker a nd Wonder Woman.
The possibility of n ew stories is vast. So is the possibility of repetition. Classic stories and characters could get, well, a bit t iresome.
“I don’t feel like it’s going to make that big a d ifference,” s ays Phil Johnston, an Oscar nominee who cowrote Disney’s 2011 “Wreck It- Ralph” and co- wrote and co- directed its sequel, 2018’ s “Ralph Breaks the Internet.”
“Like, ‘ Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey’ w as a novelty, m ade a bit of a splash, I guess. But if someone makes ‘ Steamboat Willie’ ( into) a jet ski movie or something, who cares?” he says. “If there’s some great new idea behind it, maybe. But there’s nothing I’m looking at where I’m thinking, ‘ Oh, my God, now that ‘ The Jazz Singer’ is available, I’m going to redo that.’ ”
Many c reators were clearly anxious to do something with “The Great Gatsby,” w hich h as b een subject to s everal r einterpretations i n very d ifferent flavors since it became public in 2021, says Jennifer Jenkins, a professor of law and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of Public Domain.
“We have o ur f eminist retellings o f ‘ The G reat Gatsby,’ where Jordan gets to t ell the story from her perspective, Daisy g ets to tell the story from her perspective,” Jenkins says. “We got prequels, we got sequels, we’ve got musicals, TV shows, we’ve got the zombie version because we always do. These are things that you can do with public domain work. These are things that you can do with Mickey Mouse.”
But the newly available works and characters are arriving after years of parent c orporations demanding that e very c reation be tied to their intellectual property. And with some b ig, “Barbie”- sized exceptions, the returns are growing thinner, and artists themselves are a little sick of it.
“The b iggest l imiting factor right now is that almost everything that anyone wants is has to be from existing I P,” says J ohnston, whose newest p roject is an animated adaptation o f Roald Dahl’s “The Twits” f or N etflix. “And that the notion of an original idea is somehow scary, certainly to a marketing entity, because they just have to work harder to get it into the public’s consciousness. That’s the bummer.”
And while Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen h ave been p ublic- domain g old mines at v arious t imes, other properties h ave proved more problematic. The forthcoming “Wicked,” starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, w ill be yet another attempt at using the public- domain work of author Frank Baum’s Oz — filtered through a hit novel and Broadway show — to glom onto the classic status of the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” film. Previous tries led to l ittle success, and most were outright flops, most recently 2013’ s “Oz the Great and Powerful,” from Disney.
( In an odd quirk of the “Wizard of Oz” rights, the film’s most famous artifact, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, are still the intellectual property of MGM via the 1939 film. In B aum’s book, the shoes were silver.)
Disney led the way
Some of the most effective use ever of public domain properties came from Disney itself in its early decades, turning time- tested folktales and novels into modern classics with “Snow White,” “Pinocchio” and “Cinderella.” It would later become t he p rimary p rotector of the most valuable rights in entertainment, from t he Marvel universe to the Star Wars galaxy to its homegrown content.
That h as m eant a m ajor flowering through the years of fan art and fan fiction, with which the company has a mixed relationship.
“When you look at how the Disney organization actually engages with fan art, there’s a lot of looking the other way,” says Cory Doctorow, an author and activist who advocates for broader public ownership of works. “I always thought that there was so much opportunity for collaboration that was being missed there.”
He g ives a s an example binders full o f fan- fiction biographies o f the ghosts at Disney World’s Haunted Mansion, m aintained by the teens who work there, which he o bserved when working on a project with the company’s so- called Imagineers.
“Some of i t actually i s now part of the lore,” Doctorow says. “I think that creatively that is an organization t hat really embraces that. I think commercially it’s an organization that has really struggled with it.”
When t he l aw e xtending copyright by 2 0 years passed in 1998, musicians including Bob Dylan were among the key figures who had implored Congress to act. Y ounger generations of musicians, who came up awash in sampling and remixing, made no discernible outcry for another extension. In part this could be because in the streaming era, many of them make little off recorded music.
Jimmy Tamborello, who records and performs electronic m usic u nder t he name Dntel and as part of T he Postal Service — a group whose very n ame caused t rademark h eadaches with the official version at its inception — says artists are generally happy to allow others to turn their work into new things. The problem is companies that come b etween t hem, a nd get most o f the financial benefit.
“There’s always a corporation involved,” Tamborello says. “I think no one would care if it was just artists to artists. I feel like it would be nice if it was more open, more free. It seems like it has more to do with respecting the original work.”
Johnston s ays age and experience have made him feel l ess possessive a bout his own work.
“Earlier in my career, everything was an affront. Everything m ade me a ngry and like, ‘ That was that was my idea! I should have had credit for that!’ ” he says. “I don’t want t o say I’m just easy a nd b reezy about it, but I think there are so few truly original ideas. .... We all kind of will have similar thoughts at a certain point. So i t doesn’t particularly bother me.”