Public Domain Day - January 1, 2020

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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 library. HathiTrust will make tens of thousands of titles from 1924 available in its digital library. Google Books will offer the full text of books from that year, instead of showing only snippet views or authorized previews. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can afford to publicly perform the music. Educators and historians can share the full cultural record. Creators can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs.
Sadly, with the length of the current copyright terms many "great works" are forgotten prior to entering the public domain so have to be rediscovered. 

*Also from the site - Fun fact: in the UK, the Peter Pan play and novel are subject to an unusual piece of legislation that gives the Great Ormond Street Hospital perpetual royalties from their use (just royalties, not creative control). You read more about Peter Pan and copyright at PlagiarismToday.

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