Arts — Noozify Original — October 7, 2026

Winnie-the-Pooh at 100: The Long Fight Over Who Owns a Bear

By Adam Canissario

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On October 14, 1926, the London publisher Methuen brought out Winnie-the-Pooh, ten stories about a stuffed bear, and the bear has been changing hands ever since. The toy was bought at Harrods and given to the author A.A. Milne's son, Christopher Robin, on his first birthday, August 21, 1921. The character was signed over to a New York licensing agent in 1930, passed to Walt Disney's company in 1961, fought over in court for 22 years, and, on January 1, 2022, partly handed to everybody when the original book's US copyright ran out. The centenary on October 14th is being celebrated by several owners of what is nominally the same bear, which fairly sums up the century.

Disney's party is the loudest. Its centennial announcement in March credits Milne's 1926 book in its opening paragraph, dates the bear's relationship with the company to Walt Disney's short animated films of nearly 60 years ago, and moves on to LEGO sets, Funko figures, and a collection at the clothing chain Primark. It does not mention E.H. Shepard, who drew the bear, or Stephen Slesinger, the licensing agent without whom Disney might never have owned him. That is understandable in a press release and revealing in an anniversary, because the most interesting story about Winnie-the-Pooh is not in the book. It is the biography of a character as property, written mostly in contracts.

The first contract was the one that mattered. Slesinger, a New Yorker who pioneered the licensing of children's characters, was so taken with The House at Pooh Corner, Milne's 1928 sequel, that he boarded a boat for England to ask Milne for the rights to sell Pooh merchandise. In 1930 Milne granted him exclusive merchandising and other rights in the United States and Canada for the life of the copyright and any renewal, in return for an advance and royalties ranging from 3 percent of wholesale sales to 67 percent of Slesinger's own receipts. Slesinger put out Pooh dolls, records, board games, and radio broadcasts, and he was, according to Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, the first to draw the bear in color, in a red shirt. Shepard's black-and-white Pooh had mostly gone without one. Keep an eye on the shirt.

Slesinger died in 1953, and his widow, Shirley, a former showgirl left with the rights and a one-year-old daughter, built the bear a national licensing business. Then, in 1961, Walt Disney himself came calling. She signed the rights over in exchange for ongoing royalties, and remembered Disney telling her, "Shirley, you won't be sorry." The first short film, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, arrived in 1966, and with it the bear most people now picture, rounder and calmer than Shepard's, wearing Slesinger's shirt and spelled "Winnie the Pooh," without the hyphens Milne used.

Milne's family, meanwhile, discovered it had leverage. The Copyright Act of 1976 gave authors' heirs a one-time right to cancel deals an author had made before 1978 and take the rights back, and Christopher, as Milne's son, could have used it to undo the 1930 sale. Disney proposed a renegotiation instead. On April 1, 1983, which happened to be April Fools' Day, the parties revoked the 1930 and 1961 agreements and, on the same page, granted the rights straight back to Slesinger's company, which granted them on to Disney. The royalty paid to the Pooh Properties Trust, which held the Milne estate's interest, went from about half of the Slesinger share to double it, a gain a federal appeals court, the Ninth Circuit, later said was, by some estimates, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It looked like housekeeping. It was the most consequential page in the saga.

Shirley Slesinger Lasswell later traced her grievance to a 1981 trip to Disney World, where she noticed she earned no royalties on much of the Pooh merchandise she bought. In February 1991 her company sued Disney in Los Angeles, arguing that its royalties should cover videocassettes and computer software. By the 1990s, according to her Los Angeles Times obituary, Pooh was earning Disney more than $1 billion a year, more than Mickey Mouse.

What followed was less a contract dispute than a mutual demolition of credibility. In August 2001 a judge fined Disney $90,000 for destroying boxes of documents after the suit was filed, some of them labeled as concerning Pooh's legal problems. Then it emerged that the Slesinger side had done worse. An investigator working for the company had broken into Disney office buildings and secure trash bins and trespassed onto the facility of the firm Disney paid to destroy its confidential papers, and the company had concealed it until 2002. In 2004 a different judge dismissed the 13-year-old case outright, and in September 2007 the California Court of Appeal agreed the misconduct was deliberate and egregious enough to justify that. Shirley Slesinger Lasswell had died that July, at 84, still waiting.

Disney had, by then, tried a subtler route. In March 2001 it paid about $350 million to buy out the Pooh interests held by the three institutions Milne had left a share to in his will (his old school, Westminster; the Garrick, a London club; and the Royal Literary Fund, a charity for writers), with a further payment to his granddaughter Clare. Christopher had died in 1996, having sold his own share and put part of the proceeds into a fund for Clare, who was born with cerebral palsy. His widow said after the sale that he had hated what Disney did with the books and never cared about the money. On November 4, 2002, Clare, Milne's only grandchild, tried to cancel the 1930 deal with Slesinger, using a fresh cancellation right that came with Congress's 1998 extension of copyright terms, and the same day agreed to hand whatever she recovered to Disney, which agreed to pay for the court fight. Had it worked, the Slesinger family's royalties would have disappeared.

It did not work, and the reason was that page from 1983. Those cancellation rights covered only deals made before 1978, and on December 8, 2005, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the 1930 deal no longer existed to be canceled. The trust had revoked it and replaced it with a new contract in 1983, the very deal Disney had proposed to head off Christopher's termination right. The court was unmoved by Clare's warning that this handed publishers a blueprint for defeating heirs, concluding that "Clare's imagined parade will never march forward." The Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal in June 2006. Disney had been beaten by its own paperwork.

The Slesingers' last argument was that they had only lent Disney their rights rather than selling them, and so still owned something Disney might be infringing. A federal judge ruled in 2009 that they had transferred everything, a federal trademark board threw out their challenges to Disney's Pooh trademarks, and on December 21, 2012, another federal appeals court, the Federal Circuit, held them bound by that finding, treating the 1983 agreement as an outright sale rather than a loan of rights. On October 7, 2013, the Supreme Court declined to take the case. Disney had not even filed a reply. Twenty-two years after the first filing, the bear in the red shirt belonged to Disney without qualification.

The person with the strongest claim on the original bear wanted the least to do with him. Bullied at school as the boy from the books, Christopher wrote in his 1974 memoir, The Enchanted Places, that at low moments it seemed his father had built his fame on his son's childhood and left him nothing of his own, as CBC recounted this spring. Even the toys emigrated. Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, and Tigger, the toys behind the books' characters, crossed the Atlantic in 1947 for a promotional tour by Milne's American publisher, E.P. Dutton, which gave them to the New York Public Library in 1987. In 1998 the British member of Parliament Gwyneth Dunwoody demanded them back, comparing them to the Elgin Marbles, the ancient sculptures taken from Athens's Parthenon that Greece has long asked Britain to return, and a library official replied that New York might consider returning Pooh once Britain sent the Marbles back to Greece. The quip was safe, since the Marbles sit in a British Museum that British law forbids from giving its collection away. The toys stayed put, so the five in New York are the one Pooh whose ownership was settled by a joke rather than a court. In April 2026 Queen Camilla took a gentler line and gave the library a new Roo, Kanga's baby, replacing the original toy lost in an English apple orchard in the 1930s.

The bear in the 1926 book, meanwhile, now belongs to everyone, at least in America. Milne's text and Shepard's drawings entered the US public domain on January 1, 2022, 95 years after publication, and with them the book's characters as they first appeared. Tigger, who first appeared in the 1928 sequel, had to wait until 2024. What Disney keeps is what it added, meaning its films, its later stories, its trademarks, and the look of its own bear. As Duke's analysis points out, to claim copyright in its stouter, less worried, red-shirted Pooh, Disney has to concede that its bear is different from the free one. Slesinger's red shirt has become the border.

The border's first famous test was not a scholarly edition but Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, a British slasher released in early 2023, about a year after the bear entered the public domain, in which Pooh and Piglet go on a killing spree, made for under $100,000 by the director Rhys Frake-Waterfield, who told Time he had taken great care to stay on the right side of Disney's copyright. His Pooh wears a red flannel button-up rather than Disney's red T-shirt, which is about as close to the line as a man in a bear mask can stand. Critics savaged it, it grossed $7.7 million worldwide anyway, and a sequel followed in 2024. The public domain is usually defended as a gift to scholars and schoolteachers, and the most famous use anyone has made of Pooh's freedom is a horror film, which says more about the market than the law.

So the centenary finds the bear in three sets of hands. Disney has the red shirt, the hyphen-free name, and a year of merchandise. The New York Public Library has the toys and is marking the birthday with Silly Old Bear! Winnie-the-Pooh at 100, a display running through November 30th that includes a 1926 first edition and Queen Camilla's Roo. And Americans have Shepard's bear, unshirted and faintly anxious, free to anyone who wants him. In East Sussex, England, the Ashdown Forest, whose Five Hundred Acre Wood inspired the Hundred Acre Wood where Pooh and his friends live in the books, marked the year with a giant puppet worked by ten people and modeled on heather, gorse, and an adder's eyes, a tribute no lawyer could object to.

Britain runs on its own clock. Milne died in 1956, so his text leaves UK copyright on January 1, 2027, eleven weeks after the birthday, while Shepard lived until 1976, so his drawings stay protected there until 2047. Canada, the other country in Slesinger's deal, where copyright then lasted 50 years after an author's death, let the book go in 2007. Milne sold a bear in 1930 for an advance and a percentage. It has taken a showgirl's lawsuit, a granddaughter's, an investigator in Disney's trash, and two refusals from the Supreme Court to establish exactly what he sold, and a century on, the answer is less than it used to be.