The following is an excerpt from a chapter on the tricky business of intellectual property rights in About Jenga: The Remarkable Business of Creating a Game that Became a Household Name.

In the same Massive Change interview, Lawrence Lessig points an accusatory finger at the Walt Disney Corporation, whose founder happily and lucratively created much of his greatest work by building on ideas in the public domain, such as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Yet, the corporation has since very successfully persuaded governments to extend copyright, with the effect that nobody is free to build on any work the corporation has created or property it now owns for an exceedingly long time – for example, my particular bugbear, Winnie the Pooh.