By LJ Staff

An author is challenging the copyright on characters created by James M. Barrie in his Peter Pan stories. Canadian writer Emily Somma, author of After the Rain: A New Adventure for Peter Pan, claims that Peter, Hook, and Tinkerbell etc., have fallen into public domain. However, lawyers for the copyright holder--London's Great Ormond Street Hospital--say otherwise. Somma insists that Barrie's original copyright expired in 1987, but attorneys for the hospital, which received the rights as a gift from Barrie, assert that the copyright protection act of 1976 extends the private ownership until 2023. Somma's volume already has been released by Daisy Books in her native Canada, where all things Pan are in public domain, but in England royalty rights have been extended to the hospital in perpetuity. Thus, the case, filed in a San Francisco court, seeks to resolve U.S. copyright issues. The case is just another in a growing chain of litigation by authors and would-be publishers challenging the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act.