Peter Pan copyright
In April 1929 the hospital was the recipient of playwright J. M. Barrie's copyright to the Peter Pan works, with the provision that the income from this source not be disclosed. This gave the institution control of the rights to these works, and entitled it to royalties from any performance or publication of the play and derivative works. Four theatrical feature films were produced,[12] innumerable performances of the play have been presented, and numerous editions of the novel were published under licence from the hospital. Its trustees commissioned a sequel novel, Peter Pan in Scarlet, which was published in 2006 and received mixed but generally positive reviews,[13][14] with a film adaptation planned.[15]
When the copyright originally expired at the end of 1987, 50 years after Barrie's death, the UK government granted the hospital a perpetual right to collect royalties for public performances, commercial publication, or other communications to the public of the work.[16] The UK copyright was subsequently extended through 2007 by a European Union directive in 1996 standardising terms throughout the EU to the author's life plus 70 years. GOSH has been in legal disputes in the United States, where the copyright term is based on date of publication, putting the 1911 novel in the public domain, although the Hospital asserts that the 1928 version of the play is still under copyright in the U.S.[17] Legal opinion as to whether or not permission is required for new works based on the story and characters is divided and open to interpretation and so far, there has been no legal precedent to prove one view or the other.[18]