2024 in the Public Domain
Literary works published in 1928 will be entering the public domain in the United States. Duke’s Center for the Center for the Study of the Public Domain highlights works entering the public domain in 2024. Among the best-known literary works to come into the public domain are D.H Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
The really big news in the public domain isn’t in the literary field. Mickey Mouse (at least the Steamboat Willie version) enters the public domain. See the New York Times article “These Classic Characters Are Losing Copyright Protection. They May Never Be the Same.” Also, The Washington Post has this article on “How secrecy and betrayal led to the creation of Mickey Mouse” by Joshua Kagavi (May 19, 2024). The article describes succinctly how close we came to almost living without the Disney empire. Then again, Walt probably would have found a way.
On January 4, 2024, Alexandra Petri wrote this column in the Washington Post, “Lady Chatterley and Mickey Mouse enter the public domain and all you get is this column.” Petri confabulated the two characters in a humorous manner, with Sherlock Holmes as a bystander. All Sherlock Holmes stories entered the public domain in the U.S. on January 1, 2023, though many of them had been in the public domain for years.
2023 in the Public Domain
On January 1, 2023 literary works published in 1927 generally entered the public domain in the United States. To see what entered the public domain in 2023, click HERE. It often takes a while for books entering the public domain to be available on sites like Project Gutenberg, so be patient. Copyright laws in other countries are different. In Canada, materials usually come into the public domain earlier than they do in the United States. We have many listing from the Canadian website, Faded Page, on You Read it Here. However, according to Project Gutenberg, Canada, there were some recent concessions to U.S. copyright law.
2022 was a Big Year for Public Domain Offerings!
On January 1, 2022 literary works published in 1926 will generally be entering the public domain. For a list of books entering the public domain in 2022, click HERE. Some of the popular books entering the public domain include A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh,” Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,”, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Land of the Mist,” Dorothy Parker’s “Enough Rope,” Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Torrents of Spring,” T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” and Willa Cather’s “My Mortal Enemy.” These books will be added to You Read It Here as they become available on Project Gutenberg, Google Books and other sites. Visit Duke University’s Public Domain Day, 2022 for a list of many of the items coming into the public domain in 2022.
Public Domain Day will be celebrated on January 20, 2022. Join SPARC for a virtual party. SPARC is the acronym for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. It works to enable the open sharing of educational materials and research outputs.
‘We Shall Overcome’ Is Put in Public Domain in a Copyright Settlement
Read this January 26, 2018 Article from the New York Times by Christopher Mele for free.
Article and 1966 photograph from the New York Times. The article states that a settlement resulted in the iconic song “We Shall Overcome” being placed in the public domain. An earlier ruling by a federal judge had had struck down copyright claims stating that adaptions from older works were not enough to qualify for copyright protections.
Public Domain Day is always January 1.
Graphic is from the website of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
January 1, 2021 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1925 are open to all!
By Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain
“On January 1, 2021, copyrighted works from 1925 will enter the US public domain,1 where they will be free for all to use and build upon. These works include books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and …” Read this article for information on books, music, films and other media entering the public domain in 2021.
Party Like It’s 1925 On Public Domain Day (Gatsby And Dalloway Are In)
From NPR by Neda Ulaby.
“1925 was the year of heralded novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, seminal works by Sinclair Lewis, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Agatha Christie, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley … every single one of those works has entered the public domain.”
Among the books cited in the article are:
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
The Trial (in German) by Franz Kafka
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
The New Negro edited by Alain Locke (collecting works from writers including W.E.B. du Bois, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Eric Walrond)
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie
Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs by Dorothy Scarborough
The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton
A Daughter of the Samurai by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto
If you find copies of these books, please let us know at kirkyrih@gmail.com .
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.”
GLENN FLEISHMAN, APRIL 8, 2018
This article in The Atlantic magazine states “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.” FYI, I still subscribe to The Atlantic, the greatest magazine.
“Happy Birthday to You” is in the Public Domain
Remember those tired old days when chain restaurants would have to sing ridiculous happy birthday songs because their lawyers said that they had to? Well, in 2015 a federal judge the New York Times reported “‘Happy Birthday’ Copyright Invalidated by Judge.” The judge ruled that the song belonged in the public domain and that the copyright claimed by its “owners” was invalid. This common sense ruling was based in part on the fact that the song “Happy Birthday to You” was included in The Everyday Song Book (shown to the left) which had been published in 1922. (See “An Old Songbook Could Put ‘Happy Birthday’ in the Public Domain” by Ben Sisario, New York Times, August 4, 2015.) The copyright of the song was often used as an example of copyright overreach, where copyright law was used not to protect artists but to enrich corporations and deny the public the use of materials that properly belonged in the public domain. After many decades, a judge finally agreed and for that ruling, You Read It Here thanks Judge George H. King of United States of the District Court in Los Angeles.
Finding the Public Domain
“Finding the Public Domain” is a copyright review management system toolkit by Melissa Levine et al.
“How can I tell if something is in the public domain? This is the central question addressed daily by the Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) project. It is a special question and one essential to the social bargain that society has struck with authors and rights holders.” The CRMS is a project of the University of Michigan Library funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services in collaboration with the Hathi Trust.
For persons wishing to understand the public domain, this is a useful toolkit.
More News to Be Posted Soon
