Personanondata: Disney Wants the Honey Jar Too

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Disney Wants the Honey Jar Too

Disney (although not the plaintiff) lost a court case to have the rights to the Winnie the Pooh characters returned to the family of AA Milne and illustrator E.H Shepard. Disney and the relatives were seeking to overturn an earlier case that said that Clair Milne could not void an agreement that renewed the license to Stephan Slesinger in 1983. Slesinger obtained the original rights in 1930 and in 1961 passed those rights to Disney in exchange for royalties. The Slesinger family have also been fighting Disney for more than 10 years for unpaid royalties which they estimate could exceed a $1.0billion. According to Reuters, Pooh generated over $6.0billion in retail sales in 2005 alone.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Michael Cairns

Michael Cairns is currently Head of Partner and Channel Development for the publishing unit of the American Psychological Association which is a $100million scholarly, academic and educational publisher. In this role, he is responsible for all sales and marketing activities supporting the revenue base and working with current and new partners to expand APA's publishing program and mission. Michael Cairns has served as President, CEO and CRO of several brand name publishing, technology and content-centric businesses. His career includes a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and his operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer. Mr. Cairns has also served on boards including the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.