A Landslide of Classic Art Is About to Enter the Public Domain

A Landslide of Classic Art Is About to Enter the Public Domain
For the first time in two decades, a huge number of books, films, and other works will escape U.S. copyright law.

A black-and-white photo of Charlie Chaplin at a podium, surrounded by onlookers in pews
Charlie Chaplin on the set of "The Pilgrim," which was released in 1923 Associated First National Pictures / Sunset Boulevard / Corbis / Getty


The Great American Novel enters the public domain on January 1, 2019—quite literally. Not the concept, but the book by William Carlos Williams. It will be joined by hundreds of thousands of other books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923. It’s the first time since 1998 for a mass shift to the public domain of material protected under copyright. It’s also the beginning of a new annual tradition: For several decades from 2019 onward, each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.

This coming January, Charlie Chaplin’s film The Pilgrim and Cecil B. DeMille’s The 10 Commandments will slip the shackles of ownership, allowing any individual or company to release them freely, mash them up with other work, or sell them with no restriction. This will be true also for some compositions by Bela Bartok, Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay, Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis, Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Pigeons, e.e. cummings’s Tulips and Chimneys, Noël Coward’s London Calling! musical, Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front, many stories by P.G. Wodehouse, and hosts upon hosts of forgotten works, according to research by the Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Throughout the 20th century, changes in copyright law led to longer periods of protection for works that had been created decades earlier, which altered a pattern of relatively brief copyright protection that dates back to the founding of the nation. This came from two separate impetuses. First, the United States had long stood alone in defining copyright as a fixed period of time instead of using an author’s life plus a certain number of years following it, which most of the world had agreed to in 1886. Second, the ever-increasing value of intellectual property could be exploited with a longer term.

But extending American copyright law and bringing it into international harmony meant applying “patches” retroactively to work already created and published. And that led, in turn, to lengthy delays in copyright expiring on works that now date back almost a century.

Only so much that’s created has room to persist in memory, culture, and scholarship. Some works may have been forgotten because they were simply terrible or perishable. But it’s also the case that a lack of access to these works in digital form limits whether they get considered at all. In recent years, Google, libraries, the Internet Archive, and other institutions have posted millions of works in the public domain from 1922 and earlier. With lightning-fast ease, their entire contents are now as contemporary as news articles, and may show up intermingled in search results. More recent work, however, remains locked up. The distant past is more accessible than 10 or 50 years ago.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/copywritten-so-dont-copy-me/557420/