'I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me," Winnie-the-Pooh once famously said. Words like "merchandising" would certainly have Bothered him, or "licensing rights" or even "royalties." Those were all buzzing around the Pooh legacy like bees around a honey pot last week, after a U.S. judge gave author A.A. Milne's granddaughter permission to appeal a decision about who can claim the rights to the humble but lucrative character and his friends from the Hundred Aker Wood.
If that sounds Bothersome, well, it gets worse. Ms. Clare Milne's lawsuit also bears on a dispute between Walt Disney Co. and an American family named Slesinger, heirs of the New York literary agent who acquired the licensing rights to the Pooh books from A.A. Milne in 1929. The Slesingers later struck a merchandising deal with Disney, who developed the toys, videos, movies, computer games and "collectibles" that have reaped profits in the billions of dollars for the company -- much of it in Pooh-loving Japan -- in the past couple of decades. The family is now suing Disney for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid royalties. Disney, meanwhile, is trying to slide out from under that liability by entering into a partnership with Ms. Milne.
We know what Pooh would have thought. Remember when Christopher Robin was about to go off into the world and Pooh started worrying about "all the things Christopher Robin would want to tell him when he came back . . . and how muddling it would be for a Bear of Very Little Brain to try and get them right in his mind"? Muddling is an excellent word for the present legal imbroglio. There are other good ones, too, although some of them -- like unbecoming, indecorous, repugnant -- are long words by Pooh's standards. But some he would know -- words like odd or strange, for example.