1988 The copyright history of James Barrie’s most famous creation, Peter Pan, is vexed – and legally unique.
The origin of the character was in stories Barrie told to the children of one of his friends. One of them was called Peter. The image of Pan – thanks to cultish 1890s literary paganism – was current in the Edwardian period (the mischievous goaty-god makes an entry, for example, into another favourite children’s book of the period, The Wind in the Willows).
At the time Barrie was best known as a novelist. His contemporaries would have predicted that his reputation with posterity would rest on such works as Auld Licht Idylls, or The Little Minister. These are out of print nowadays and largely forgotten, while Peter Pan, thanks to the Christmas pantomime, is set to fly on till the crack of doom.
The character was first introduced in Barrie’s 1902 novel for adults, The Little White Bird. The play (aimed at children, principally) Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up had its premiere in London on 27 December 1904. The novel Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens was spun off as a follow-up to the play in 1906. Barrie then adapted the play into another novel, Peter and Wendy (usually shortened to Peter Pan), in 1911. In 1929 Barrie, who had no children of his own, donated the work, and all the Peter Pan revenues, to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, in London.
These differing initiation dates, originating conceptions and ownership issues have caused copyright confusion (as has the fact that there is, in Anglo-American law, no copyright in ideas, scenarios or characters – only in the verbal forms in which they are expressed).
Further confusion has arisen in the decades since Barrie’s death, in 1937. The work, popularised by such (copyright licensed) adaptations as Walt Disney’s in 1953, has been a major source of revenue for the hospital. The normal term of copyright in the UK is 50 years post mortem, which meant that Peter Pan entered the public domain at the end of 1987.
It then re-entered copyright protection with the EU ‘harmony’ regulations of 1995, which extended copyright to 70 years post mortem. This was done largely to compensate German literary estates, which had lost out on international copyright revenue during the Second World War. Along with Mein Kampf (whose copyright had expired in 1995) Peter Pan was given a new lease of copyright life until 2007, when – in the normal course of events – it would have popped back into the public domain on the 70th anniversary of Barrie’s death.
This process, however, was forestalled by a measure introduced by the Labour government in 1998 (interested in keeping a healthy income stream into the NHS). This extraordinary amendment to the law affecting intellectual property:
conferred on trustees for the benefit of the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London, a right to a royalty in respect of the public performance, commercial publication, broadcasting or inclusion in a cable programme service of the play ‘Peter Pan’ by Sir James Matthew Barrie, or of any adaptation of that work, notwithstanding that copyright in the work expired on 31 December 1987.
The situation (particularly in the US) is tangled and has led to serial litigation. But in essence the situation is simple. Peter, the perpetual boy, has – from 1 January 1988 onwards – perpetual copyright. For ever and ever, amen.