Walt Disney Corp. lost another round in the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday in the 15-year legal battle over the merchandising rights to Winnie the Pooh characters.

Without comment, the Supreme Court turned away an appeal filed by Clair Milne, granddaughter of Pooh creator A.A. Milne, to acquire the rights from Stephen Slesinger Inc., which bases ownership of the rights to the Pooh franchise to an agreement signed between Slesinger, a literary agent, and Milne in 1930.

Burbank-based Disney has been seeking to end its obligation to pay royalties to Slesinger. In a separate case not directly affected by the High Court’s action, Slesinger contends Disney underpaid royalties by hundreds of millions of dollars over the past two decades.

Author A.A. Milne sold the rights to his Pooh creations in 1930 to Stephen Slesinger, a New York literary agent. When Slesinger died in 1953, the rights passed to Shirley, his widow. Thirteen years later, she licensed the rights to Disney in return for a cut of the revenue from sales of merchandise. Winnie the Pooh earned an estimated $5.9 billion in 2002, Forbes Magazine estimates.

Clare Milne sought to invoke a provision in federal copyright law that in some circumstances lets family members of authors recapture the rights to works that prove unexpectedly popular, Bloomberg News reported.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said that legal provision didn’t apply because of a 1983 renegotiation of the Pooh rights. That agreement involved Disney, the Slesinger company and Christopher Robin Milne, who is Claire’s grandfather and the son of AA Milne. The copyrights for Milne’s four original Pooh books expire around 2020.