4 January—Why was Eeyore sniffing around the outhouse? It’s obvious, so don’t think too hard.

That conundrum is in celebration of “Winnie-the-Pooh,” along with other works first published in 1926, having just come into the public domain with the new year. And about time, too. But it must be noted that Pooh’s pals introduced in later books, like Tigger, remain under copyright protection until their 95-yearses pass.

Other 1926-vintage works that it’s now perfectly legal to do whatever you bloody well please with include:

“Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde” by Felix Salten. Young Whittaker Chambers, at the time a card-carrying communist, recently out of Columbia University, translated it for Simon & Schuster as “Bambi, a Life in the Woods.” “Bambi” was banned in Germany in the thirties because Salten, born Siegmund Salzmann, was Jewish.

“The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” by T.E. Lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia’s autobiography.

“The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway’s first published novel.

“Soldiers’ Pay,” William Faulkner’s first published novel.

“The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” Agatha Christie’s third novel featuring the supercilious Belgian dick Hercule Poirot.

Music that’s now in the public domain includes:

“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” by Irving Berlin; “Bye Bye Black Bird” by Ray Henderson and Mort Dixon; “Someone to Watch Over Me” by George and Ira Gershwin; “Are You Lonesome To-Night” by Roy Turk and Lou Handman; “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along” by Harry Woods; “Nessun Dorma” (from “Turandot”) by Giacomo Puccini, Franco Alfano, Giusseppe Adami, and Renato Simoni.

And there’s all sorts of other stuff too numerous to catalogue. Copyright law is complex and abstruse, just like patent and trademark law. If you have nothing better to do, you might want to visit the United States Patent and Trademark Office at uspto.gov and the Copyright Office at copyright.gov, a function of the Library of Congress, to see what’s going on.

In the good old days, the term of copyright protection was just 56 years. But thanks to a strong and well-financed (of course) Disney lobby, in 1976 Congress extended the term to 75 years. And in 1998, again motivated by Disney, the so-called Mickey Mouse Protection Act (a.k.a. the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act) extended copyright protection to 95 years.

Mickey Mouse is due to be public-domained in 2024. We’ll see what the whores in the Capitol come up with to suck up to the Walt Disney Company entertainment conglomerate.

By the way, if you haven’t figured it out, Eeyore sniffed around the outhouse because he was looking for Pooh . . .