The Artful Jurist

A Reuters story reports that a federal court has tossed out a claim for hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties stemming from the characters of A.A. Milne's much-loved books on Winnie the Pooh.

The dispute, which apparently has been going on in the courts for 18 years, was brought by the heirs of the man who purchased the Pooh marketing rights from Milne and then re-sold them to Disney in 1961. According to the report, a U.S. judge in Los Angeles has finally dismissed the last remaining claims in the copyright infringement action against Disney. (I realized when I was reading casebooks in law school, it's darn hard to beat the Mouse in court.)

In a tangentially related story, a new Pooh character, Lottie the Otter, is about to be unveiled in a book titled Return to the Hundred Acre Wood. (See the New York Times story.) It's being billed as the first authorized Pooh book in 80 years.

Don't you wish you wrote something that still had marketability 80 years after the last one was published?