Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie the Pooh lived in the Disney Corporation all by himself under the protection of US copyright and trademark law. But then, one day, something changed. Someone made a very cheap-looking horror film called Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey, because, as of this year, the beloved honey addict from the Hundred Acre Wood is now in the public domain. And that means that you no longer have to get the copyright owner's permission to use them, distribute them, build on them, create new works, or anything like that.
Christopher Robin's BFF is now free for anyone to use, because in the US, it's 95 years since the character first appeared in print. Tigger, however, didn't appear until 1928, which means he won't be available until 2024. And Pooh Bear's famous red shirt? That didn't appear until the 30s, which means it's still owned by Disney.
Disney may not be thrilled about losing Pooh Bear, but they've got bigger mice to fry. Because Mickey Mouse is actually the reason this is happening. Back in 1928, when Mickey made his debut in Steamboat Willie, US copyright laws meant Disney had exclusive...
control of the iconic character for 56 years. But in the 70s, with that expiry fast approaching, the company used its muscle to get the US government to extend it to 75 years. And then, in the 90s, they did it again, pushing it out to 95 years.
years, which today gives Mickey about a year and a half until he can headline his own slasher, Last Mouse on the Left for instance. Just an idea. We were gearing up to have this fight yet again around 2017-18 because works were about to start entering the public domain again. But to our surprise we didn't get the same kind of political pressure this time around because very few of them still have any value the way that Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh do.
It's why we can remix Shakespeare into teen comedies and musicals or add the undead to Jane Austen. I was unaware that zombies possessed the required acuity to set such traps. It's why you could make your own Wizard of Oz movie tomorrow, so long as you avoid the ruby slippers which still belong to MGM.
Whenever you get a really popular work entering the public domain, it leads to a huge surge in creativity. We're seeing that with this Winnie the Pooh slash film. We saw it with Alice in Wonderland. We saw it as well with the Sherlock Holmes stories.
So as 20th century works start to tumble out of copyright, are our beloved childhood friends now free, or has the purity of these characters been lost forever? There he goes! There he goes!
This is crazy, but I think it's genius from the people who have worked out that the copyright's ending and then to cast Winnie the Pooh or a version of Winnie the Pooh in a horror slasher film. I thought you cast him. Well, yeah.
Winnie didn't turn up to an audition. He's the genius, the foresight. He did. Except, isn't it, so those sort of laws, it seems to me, would have been made before, like, mass media, right?
Yeah. Does it work when they can still be distributing? I'm surprised Disney's allowed this to lapse. I mean, I feel like if you're still, it should be from the last thing made.
If you're still making Winnie the Pooh, if they made one in 2015, you get another 75 years. I feel like the, where, you know, it's not really the owners anymore, but I guess the owners. I don't want to say Darth Vader.
Vader films, unless I'm in it, like, you know, in 50 years that are just... Well, you shouldn't be punished because your work is popular, right? So if you've started it and then people love it and it's gone on for 95 years, then...
People can, surely that should be owned in perpetuity, like that somebody couldn't destroy your work. Yeah, but what do you think about the Shakespeare example, right? So Shakespeare's very popular and one of the reasons Shakespeare's popular is there's no copyright so people can put on Shakespeare productions all the time and that's how it lives on.
But also isn't this hypocritical of Disney too because lots of their films as well would have been based off copyright finishing up for different things, right? Or traditional stories. Yeah, Alice in Wonderland, Jungle Book.
Exactly. Things like that? Maybe it's a wrong thing to focus on Disney because Disney can probably take care of themselves with so many other properties. They'll survive. Disney are going to do OK.
But what happens to that person who has that one creation, who gets passed down? But maybe, oh, so they're family. Yeah. Can I just put it, it's different in different countries, right? So in Australia it's 70 years, not 95. But I've just heard that in Australia, James Bond.
is available. I can play Bond. You can play Bond.
You can play Bond. I could, anyone can play Bond. Girls can play Bond.
Well, hello. We can all play Bond. Are you going to write the film? Yes, I will.
Yeah. I will.