A happy Public Domain Day to all!
Okay, for non-celebrants, Public Domain Day happens every January 1st and recognizes the expiration of copyrights from decades past. When a copyright expires, it enters into the public domain, where the general public can (generally) use and reproduce the work however they see fit. For example, since Hard Times was published in 1854 and Charles Dickens died in 1895, you’re more than free to reproduce and sell Hard Times to your heart’s content; or, like some publishers have already done, reinvent it as Hard Times and Zombies.
Before I say anymore: this is not legal advice (you wouldn’t want it from me anyway) and copyright law can become quite complicated, so do your due diligence before replicating any work or artistic expression. But, in short, copyright is meant to temporarily protect the integrity of a created work for the benefit of the creator. The operative word being temporarily. After which, it’s made accessible to the public for the public good.
Copyright falls under a type of law known as Intellectual Property law, which can apply to industry and science as well. Intellectual Property law is meant to protect creator and creation, allowing them to profit and develop without fear of bad actors interfering in their intellectual process or financial support. Copyright tends to deal with art and artistic expression and its meaning was, and continues to be, quite literal: who has the right to copy and reproduce a piece of art and profit from it. Copyright protection is different from country to country. For example, The Lord of the Rings won’t enter the Public Domain until the year 2044 in the U.S. and Canada; in New Zealand however, where copyright protection exists for only 50 years past the death of the author, The Lord of the Rings is currently public domain.
As of 1787, copyright became a constitutional right in the United States. To quote: [The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The Copyright Act of 1790 defined the term ‘limited Times’ as 14 years. In the over two hundred years which have elapsed, the Act has been updated several times, and currently, copyright exists over the course of the life of the author + 70 years after their death. Importantly, this last extension, signed by President Clinton in 1998, applies only to works published after 1977; so that books like A Farewell to Arms and The Sound and the Fury adhere to older copyright protections and are, as of this year, in the public domain.
Along with these and other famous works, here are few other literary pieces entering the public domain*
- The Maracot Deep and Other Stories, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Apple Cart, by George Bernard Shaw
- Laughing Boy, by Oliver La Farge
- Coonardoo, by Katharine Susannah Prichard
- All Quiet on the Western Front (English Translation), by Erich Maria Remarque
- Tarzan and the Lost Empire, Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Dear Judas and Other Poems, by Robinson Jeffers
- The Winding Stair (Fountainhead Press First Edition), by W.B. Yeats
- A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf
Archives like Project Gutenberg do a phenomenal job of formatting public domain works for digital consumption. So with the passing of another Public Domain Day, take a moment to explore these new, publicly available titles. You never know what you might discover to inspire you going into a new year.
*As WSP has not personally reviewed each of these works, we make no endorsement of their content
