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Showing posts from January, 2020

Public Domain Day - January 1, 2020

What do the following works all have in common? musical composition of Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin  The Man in the Brown Suite by Agatha Christie When We Were Very Young  by A.A. Milne The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann the first film adaption of Peter Pan* They all entered the US public domain on January 1, 2020! On that day works from 1924 entered the US public domain " where they will be free for all to use and build upon, without permission or fee ." As a historic note, these works would have entered public domain in 2000, but Congress extended copyright terms to 95 years, so we just began having yearly release of works into the public domain in 2019 again.  Why is this important?  Yearly new works are made available for a variety of uses.  From the Center for the Study of the Public Domain (maintained by Duke Law): How will people celebrate this trove of cultural material? The Internet Archive will add books, movies, music, and more to its online l