We hope with your assistance we can mount a successful effort to free Winnie-the Pooh, imprisoned by various copyright laws since his birth in 1926. At the beginning of Project Gutenberg, one of our first projects was going to be the children's classic Winnie-the-Pooh: written in 1926, and therefore up for copyright renewal in 1954, and the copyright renewal would have then expired in 1982, and thus been a perfect candidate for Project Gutenberg's Children's Library. However, this was not allowed to happen. Instead, the copyright on Winnie-the-Pooh was extended, for a 75 year total, meaning we would have to wait until 2001 for the new copyright term to expire, effectively keeping Winnie-the-Pooh in jail for another two decades or so. However, two new bills have been introduced into the Senate, and the House of Representatives of the United States to extend this term of imprisonment yet again, for an additional 20 years. The last copyright extension in the United States was in 1975 as I recall. If we extend the copyright 20 years every 20 years we will destroy the very concept of Public Domain, as we have known it since the beginning of copyright. Copyright only began when people other than those extremely rich few who could afford a price of a family farm for every book had their places as the only owners of books destroyed by Gutenberg, the inventor of the moveable type printing press. Mass availability of books was just something that should not be tolerated. . .therefore the printers' guilds lobbied for a right to decide not only who could print any book but whether the book would be printed at all. This was a very strong monopoly put on an industry that had been a free-for-all since Gutenberg. This copyright remained virtually the same length, 28 years, for quite a while, and the first United States copyright was for two 14 year periods, the second automatically given on request. When books once again became too popular at the turn of the last century, and many publishers began selling inexpensive sets of a variety of extensive subjects, the copyrights were doubled again so that the 14 years plus 14 year extension became 28 years with a 28 year extension, which was done around 1909. Then, in the last half of this century, books once again were to become too widely spread, this time with the advent of the xerox machine. Not only were new laws made to curb copying, but those old laws were extended from that 28+28=56 years to 75 years, and this was done in 1975 or so. Now with the advent of truly UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION available to the world via computer files, books are once again getting to be too widely spread, and further restriction is in the works, this time only 20 years after the last extension, which was for about 20 years. Work is already underway for a permanent copyright to keep us from putting "the Library of Congress" on our disks.