Winnie the Pooh

With the turn of the New Year, the original Winnie the Pooh book has entered the public domain alongside classic works like Felix Salten’s Bambi, A Life in the Woods and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. These titles were originally published in 1926 and have reached the end of the 95-year period of copyright protection afforded to works in the US. Legally speaking, this means the original source material for everybody’s honey-obsessed bear is free to be shared, performed, reused, repurposed, or sampled without permission or cost. Only the first collection of Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne’s short stories published in 1926 is entering the public domain; he also published The House at Pooh Corner in 1928, introducing the character Tigger. Disney acquired the film and merchandi...