Public Domain Day

When the calendar rolls over on January 1st of each year, thousands of books, articles, photographs, works of art, music scores, and unpublished documents go out of copyright and become the common property of the citizens of a given country, giving them the opportunity for cultural renewal and intellectual exploration in all fields of human activity and interest.

CopyrightWatch has posted two lists of authors (including musicians and other creators of art) whose works went out of copyright as of January 1, 2007: one for those countries (the majority) where copyright subsists for fifty years after the author’s death and one for “the quarter or so of the world where the copyright term has foolishly been extended to life+70.”

Among the “life+50” authors, musicians, and scientists are H.L. Mencken, American journalist and author; Art Tatum, American jazz pianist; Walter de la Mare, English poet, short story writer, and novelist; A. A. Milne, English author (Winnie the Pooh); Irène Joliot-Curie, French physicist; Max Beerbohm, English theater critic; Jackson Pollock, American painter; and Clarence E. Mulford, American adventure novelist (Hopalong Cassidy).

Among the “life+70” group are Oswald Spengler, German historian and polymath; G. K. Chesterton, English author; A.E. Housman, English scholar and poet; Maxim Gorky, Russian author; García Lorca, Spanish poet and dramatist; Lincoln Steffens, pioneering American “muckraker” journalist; Gustave Kahn, French Symbolist poet and art critic; and Rudyard Kipling, British author and poet (The Jungle Book, Gunga Din).

CopyrightWatch concludes, “The dead hand of dead-letter copyright is lifted on the works of these, and many other authors and composers, and lesser-known ordinary people who left a cultural legacy. Modern-day creative people, historians, academics, and citizens of all interests, can recreate and build on the legacy they left us.”

Long live the public domain!