Wednesday, January 23, 2019
As of January 1, 2019 works first published in the United States in 1923 have entered the public domain. It has been 21 years since the US has seen such a large volume of works enter the public domain and never before in the digital age. The 20th century is largely missing from the internet.
We can blame Mickey Mouse for this. In 1928, Disney would have lost copyright protection in 2004. A major push from corporations and individual entertainers urged congress to pass the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This added 20 years onto the copyright term. Mickey now would be protected until 2024 and no copyrighted work would enter the public domain until 2019. It's 2019!
According to Glenn Fleishman in the (“Smithsonian Magazine”, 2019):
That deluge of works includes not just “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Which appeared first in the New Republic in 1923, but hundreds of thousands of books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and films. After January 1, any record label can issue a dubstep version of the 1923 hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” any middle school can produce Theodore Pratt’s stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray and any historian can publish Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis with her own extensive annotations. Any artist can create and sell a feminist response to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal Dadaist piece, The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) and any filmmaker can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments and post it on YouTube.
Not only does this open the door to more creative works, but widens access for all.
Written by: Christine Barth, Resources for Libraries