@Lady Arguably the theatre or any successors, or possibly just an orphaned work? (Peter Pan, the play, is my favorite "what is even going on?" children's story for licensing weirdness. Woe betide anyone trying to do something with it in the UK, or the US until recently.)
@aschmitz it’s very interesting because every article about Golan v. Holder explicitly talks about Peter and the Wolf no longer being public domain, but none of them identify any party who actually has the ability or motivation to levy a copyright infringement lawsuit
presumably there is someone, but it just goes to show in a sense how people think about these things (wrongly, imo)
@Lady I suspect that in general we just haven't really figured out what to do with "orphaned works" in general: they're theoretically copyright even though nobody actually controls that right. (You can of course argue about whether that means they actually are or not: either way the effect is the same as if they are not, but it is hard if not impossible to be sure that they actually aren't controlled.)
@aschmitz and not always favouring the corporations!