Works hitting the public domain this year
January 1st isn’t just the first day of a new year. It’s also a day of celebration for those interested in accessing thousands of items, now to be found in the public domain. What unifies these materials is the fact that their authors all perished in 1943, making their works (in some but not all places) available for free.
Works by George Washington Carver, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nikola Tesla, and Beatrix Potter, to name a few, are among The Public Review’s top picks for 2014.
According to the website, most works fall out of copyright eventually. It’s just a matter of time. In America, that generally means that anything published pre-1923 is out there in the public domain. However, that is not the case for unpublished materials from that same time period – those are protected under federal copyright for the life of the author, plus 70 years. And don’t get me started about things published from 1964-1977; I need a law degree to figure that out...or this handy chart from Cornell University :)
Which is why http://www.publicdomainday.org/ is a great tool for librarians who like to keep up with this kind of stuff. The website’s homepage lists featured authors and works now available, initiatives for the coming year, and helpful links. The focus of the website is on celebrating the fact that this type of information is fully available for anyone to use, without authorization of any kind. According to their manifesto, the public domain “is the basis of our self-understanding as expressed by our shared knowledge and culture. It is the raw material from which new knowledge is derived and new cultural works are created.”
Some works may never fall into the public domain. In the United Kingdom, a perpetual copyright exists for the King James Version of the Bible. The same goes for Peter Pan, as long as the Great Ormond Street Hospital is in operation (which holds the rights for the J.M. Barrie’s play). And here’s a list of American works that will not be included in this year’s cornucopia:
http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2014/pre-1976
So what's on your public domain reading list?
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Comments
My top pick from this year's class: W.W. Jacobs. Come for the cursed monkey paw, stay for the humorous sailors.
For more on how America's endlessly extended copyright is affecting our literary memory, check out this article (with nifty graph!)
Basically, the vast majority of works published between 1930 and 1990 aren't profitable enough to be republished under copyright, but many of them would be republished if they were in the public domain. So there's a 50-year gap in our second-tier canon that wouldn't exist under the old copyright laws.
Steamboat Willie is slated to go PD in 2019, so look forward to some really energetic lobbying from Disney over the next several years. Because intellectual property needs to be protected forever like Mickey Mouse, not just left around for anyone to steal like Cinderella or Snow White.
Thanks for sharing! It's all about access.
Great group photo!
Thanks for sharing this important information, Jana. We all need to keep this in mind for our customers!