Your Public Domain Day Report, 2019: YES!!!

Today, at last, is Public Domain Day in the United States. For the first time in decades, some American copyrights were actually allowed to expire naturally, a mere thirty-nine years later than planned. So after years of blogging, every January first, about what wasn't entering public domain and what would have entered public domain under earlier laws, I can finally blog about what is entering public domain.

Various media outlets are covering this as a strange oddity, to the point that they're trying to explain what the public domain is to a puzzled and skeptical public. But the oddity is that we've kept so much in copyright for so long. What is happening today should not be news. It is a return to normal.

So today everything that was originally published in 1923 becomes free for anyone to republish, repurpose, or reuse. If that seems drastic to you, remember that all of those copyrights were originally set to expire in 1980. After the copyright law was revised in the late seventies, those works should still have become public domain in 1999. Ninety-five years of copyright protection is much more than enough.

Other places have already compiled lists of the big hits becoming publicly available: Robert Frost's Pulitzer-winning collection New Hampshire, with its smash hit single "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening," Harold Lloyd's classic short Safety, Last! (the one where he dangles off the clock), the Charleston, "Yes! We Have No Bananas," King Oliver's recording of "Dippermouth Blues" with his kid sidekick, Louis Armstrong. Hemingway's stories "Up in Michigan" and "My Old Man," become free for anyone to use today, and Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities, and Cather's A Lost Lady. Dorothy Sayers's detective Lord Peter Wimsey enters public domain as his first appearance does, but woe betide you if you try to publish a Wimsey mystery that draws on elements of his character from later, still-copyrighted appearances. 1923 was a busy year. We should have everything from 1962, or at least everything from 1943, but I'm happy to have the public-domain clock ticking again.

Perhaps more importantly, anyone is now free to rescue any obscure work from 1923 that they think deserves more attention. Want to digitize an old silent film before the last copy disintegrates? Want to republish a novel from 1923 that was totally ahead of its time? Go ahead. You don't have to track down the copyright holders to pay them. A lot of works that should have already been rescued in this way haven't, because after this long copyright holders are impossible to track down. One of the problems of making copyright terms so ungodly long is that it prevents salvage and restoration efforts, because the original copyright holders have lost track or lost interest.

We think of copyright as the right to publish, but what it really is, in practice, is the right to prevent publication. If you're making money of a novel that's in copyright, you can keep anyone else from publishing it. But copyright also means many things can't be published at all. And it frees the copyright holders, who are protected from competition, not to publish particular versions of the works they control. If Disney wanted to take the 1977 theatrical release of Star Wars out of circulation until 2073, they would have the legal right to do that.

So Vintage Books will be republishing Frost's New Hampshire this month, right on time, in an edition that recreates the woodcut illustrations from the original publication. (Those illustrations just entered public domain today, too.) No one's been able to buy a copy of New Hampshire as a stand-alone for decades. The original publisher, Henry Holt, could have brought one out any time they liked, pictures and all. But they didn't want to. They wanted to sell you Frost's complete poems, or a selection of favorites. Imagine the Beatles's rights-holders would sell you a box set, or a collection of greatest hits, but not Sergeant Pepper's or Abbey Road. If you wanted to see the actual book of poems that Frost put together, in the form he chose at that point in his career, you basically couldn't.

Starting now, readers will have a choice. You can still get the collected poems from Holt. You can get an individual collection of poems from Vintage. If Holt doesn't like that, they can reissue New Hampshire themselves. Maybe they'll have to commission some extra bells and whistles to make their book more attractive to buyers, like a new introduction or notes or copies of Frost's drafts. The choices will only increase. You can combine "Stopping by the Woods" with its original illustration as a poster if you want, and that's not necessarily a bad idea. In fact, putting Frost back into circulation in a competitive market economy might give the old boy some new life. It's probably good for him. In fact, it should have happened thirty years earlier.

Your Public Domain Report for 2018

Hey gang! It's time for Public Domain Day again, where we list all of the music, film, books, and other pieces of art leaving copyright today. And here's that list again, just like last year:

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Happy New Year.

Although the Framers of the Constitution only gave Congress power to grant copyrights and patents "for a limited time," repeated extensions have made sure that nothing has entered the public domain in the United States since January 1, 1979. Today makes nearly forty years since that happened.

Copyright in this country had a 28-year maximum back during the George Washington administration. By the 20th century that had become a very reasonable 6 years. Then the 1976 Copyright Act and the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act  ensured that big media company's like Disney and Sony got to keep their intellectual property out of the public domain forever.

The big news is that the public domain clock is due to unfreeze in exactly one year, on January 1, 2019, unless Congress extends copyright terms again. Left to their own devices, Congress will certainly do that. But they haven't written that law yet, and there's time to lobby. Call your senators and representatives this year, and tell them not to extend copyright any more.

In the meantime, as every year, I have to write a post about what would be entering public domain today. What are we missing?

If Not for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

Today is the day Casablanca should enter the public domain. Actually, under the law when it was made, it should have become public domain in 1999. The 1976 extension delayed that until today, but that apparently was still not enough. We'll always have Paris, if by "always" we mean "never."

This is also the day the public would get the rights to Bambi, Flying Tigers with John Wayne, Now, Voyager, The Palm Beach Story, Across the Pacific, Andy Hardy's Double Life, The Courtship of Andy Hardy, noir classic The Glass Key and horror favorite Cat People, musical For Me and My Gal, In Which We Serve, the original live-action The Jungle Book,  Mrs. Miniver, Orson Welles's Magnificent Ambersons, Lon Chaney in The Mummy's Tomb, My Sister Eileen, My Favorite Blonde, The Pride of the Yankees, The Road to Morocco, Saboteur, The Talk of the Town, This Gun's for Hire, To Be or Not to Be, Tortilla Flat, Woman of the Year with Tracy and Hepburn, and James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy. Ronald Reagan's finest work as an actor, Kings Row, would become public domain today. So would George Gershwin's classic Christmas musical Holiday Inn (which I will spend part of this New Year's Day watching, as usual), and all the songs in it, including "White Christmas."

Unlike the last few New Year's Days, today would not see many major cartoon characters enter the public domain, mostly because those classic characters would be in the public domain already. The big exception is Tweety Bird. Thought you say a puddy tat? Not for another twenty years.

Most of the great Golden Age comic-book heroes would also be in the public domain already, but today they would be joined by various classic sidekicks (like Wonder Woman's pal Etta Candy, villains (such as Two-Face and Shade), and minor colleagues: Guardian, Metallo, Mr. Terrific,  Kid Eternity, Mary Marvel, Robotman, and Wildcat.

But on the science fiction front, Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics would become free to use today.

In literature, Albert Camus's The Stranger should become public domain today, as should his Myth of Sisyphus. C.S. Lewis also has a fiction/non-fiction double-header, with his Preface to Paradise Lost and his classic Screwtape Letters. Raymond Chandler's The High Window and Ellery Queen's Calamity Town should leave copyright today. So should Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, Steinbeck's The Moon is Down, O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet  and Jean Anouilh's Antigone. We could also look forward to Eliot's Little Gidding, Wallace Stevens's Parts of the World, and Langston Hughes's Shakespeare in Harlem.

In the world of music, "White Christmas" is the big headline. But Duke Ellington classics "C-Jam Blues" and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" would enter public domain, too, as would Cole Porter's "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To." Other ontributions to the great American songbook by Johhny Mercer, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer, Jerome Kern, Mack Gordon, and Johnny Burke would become free for all to use. And there would be plenty of classical music, too: Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man and works by Britten, Barber, Schoenberg, Kachuturian, and those crazy Russians Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev.

Not the richest year overall, since most of the West was pretty busy doing other things in 1942, but still a pretty respectable haul. Still, we'll have to wait until 2038 for those works, and longer if Congress passes another extension in the next 12 months.

If not for the 1976 Copyright Act:

A mother lode of classic movies were scheduled to enter public domain today, under the law at the time they were made: West Side Story, Breakfast at Tiffany's, La Dolce Vita, Judgement at Nuremberg, The Children's Hour, Last Year at Marienbad and The Hustler. Copyright was also originally set to expire on One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Absent-Minded Professor, The Guns of Navarone, Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii, Splendor in the Grass, The Parent Trap, Babes in Toyland, Divorce Italian Style, El Cid with Charlton Heston, Five Minutes to Live, Flower Drum Song, Gidget Goes Hawaiian, King of Kings, The Misfits, Mysterious Island, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Raisin in the Sun, Town Without Pity, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and last but not least, Kurosawa's Yojimbo.

Joseph Heller's classic novel Catch-22 should enter public domain today, as should fiction by
Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Agatha Christie, Stanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard, Patricia Highsmith, Poul Anderson, Brian Aldiss, Margaret Lawrence, H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, Theodore Sturgeon, Iris Murdoch, Evelyn Waugh, and Harold Robbins. Let's not forget Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Muriel Spark's Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mister Biswas, John Le Carre's fiction debut A Call for the Dead, and, oh yes, J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey.

James and the Giant Peach should enter public domain today, but what would happen if a beloved children's story became public domain? So should Beckett's Happy Days, Genet's The Screens, and Tennessee Williams's Night of the Iguana. And let's not leave out three important and influential non-fiction works: Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, and Janes Jacobs's classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

It should be a great year music, with tunes by Sinatra, Elvis, Judy Collins, John Coltrane, Chuck Berry, Judy Garland, Roy Orbison, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Cash, Count Basie, Sun Ra (and his Arkestra), Patsy Cline, Rachmaninoff, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Johnny Mercer, Henry Mancini, and Willie Nelson becoming publicly available. 

But all of those works will stay firmly in the hands of Sony, Disney, Time Warner, etc., until at least 2057. Someone needs another 39 years of royalties from Moon River, apparently.

What will become public a year from today:

But let's keep our eye on the prize. The current law is not changed (and you should expect Congress and the lobbying industry to try), works first publishes in 1923 will become public domain in the US next January 1. The public-domain clock, which has been stuck in place since January 1, 1979, is set to come unstuck. (Yes, this means that everything published in 1922 is public domain but nothing published in 1923 is, and it has been that way for 39 years now.)

If we can keep the lobbyists at bay, Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening," the one that ends "And miles to go before I sleep," will leave copyright next New Year's Day. So will Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "Emperor of Ice-Cream." Likewise, Yeats's collection The Cat and the Moon, and various poems by Cummings, Djuna Barnes, St. Vincent Millay, Edward Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, and William Carlos Williams.

Jean Toomer's Cane is due to become public, and Hemingway's first chapbook Three Stories and Ten Poems. Willa Cather's A Lost Lady; Tarzan and the Golden Lion; Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet; Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities; Agatha Christie's Murder on the Links. Works by Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, P.G. Wodehouse, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau. Beloved Czech classic the Good Soldier Svejk. Classic silent films by Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin. Works that are classic, and already almost a century old; works that are forgotten, but cannot be republished and rediscovered because it's been so long that the copyright owners can no longer be found and so there's an, ahem, Catch-22: you can't republish the work without paying for permission, but you can't find the person you need to pay.

We can begin a return to copyright sanity in one short year, if we just keep our lawmakers from being crazy.

Whose woods these are I think I know: 
They'll likely keep them private, though.

cross-posted from Dagblog (all comments welcome there, not here)

Your Public Domain Update for 2017

Happy New Year all! As every year, I'm writing a blog post for Public Domain Day, listing all of the old books, movies, pieces of music, and works of art that are leaving copyright to join the public domain today. And, as every year in the United States, that list contains nothing at all. Public Domain Day is for people in other countries. Instead, we get Congress repeatedly extending the copyright terms to keep lobbyists for big media companies happy, so that virtually nothing has entered the public domain in the United States since January 1, 1978. So, as every year, I have to write a post about what would be entering public domain today.

Copyright in this country originally had a 28-year maximum, which gradually got doubled to 56 years (originally it was 14 years, renewable for a second 14, and then 28 renewable for 28 more). In the 1970s, Congress extended the term of copyright, freezing the public-domain clock so that nothing created after 1922 would become public for decades. That clock has never been restarted: just before the newer, longer copyrights could expire at the end of the 1990s, Congress extended them again with the Millennium Copyright Act, sometimes called the Sonny Bono act for one of its sponsors. The Constitution specifically forbids perpetual copyright; it only gives Congress the power to grant patents and copyrights for a "limited time." But Congress has gotten around this by simply granting one "limited" extension after another, so that Mickey Mouse (for example), stays in private ownership forever.

So, what are we missing?


If Not for the Millennium Copyright Act:

Citizen Kane would enter the public domain today. Let's just leave that one there for a minute: Citizen Kane. 

Also in the movies, we would get public rights to Dumbo, The Maltese Falcon, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Babes on Broadway, Charlie Chan in Rio, Abbot and Costello classics Buck Privates and Hold That Ghost!, The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Devil and Miss Jones (the Devil got a lot of work in 1941, and not just in Hollywood), Hellzapoppin', High Sierra, The Lady Eve, The Little Foxes, Major Barbara, Meet John Doe (which is feeling pretty topical right now), Moon Over Miami, Pimpernel Smith with Leslie Jones as the fearless Scarlet Pimpernel, The Road to Zanzibar with Hope and Crosby, Sergeant York, The Sea Wolf, The Shadow of the Thin Man, Sullivan's Travels, Hitchcock's original version of Spellbound, Tarzan's Secret Treasure, Tobacco Road, and The Wolf Man. Oh, and lest we forget, 1941's Oscar winner for Best Picture, How Green Was My Valley. (Better luck next time, Orson! Maybe your cinematography should have been more innovative!)

Wonder Woman should be leaving copyright today, free for anyone to write and draw. (So that someone, for example, could create a version of the world's mightiest woman who was not dressed like a streetwalker.) So would a host of Golden Age comic heroes, including Blackhawk, Plastic Man, Green Arrow, Aquaman, and lesser-known heroes such as Starman and Dr. Mid-Nite. (If you don't know who those are, well, my brother would never let me hear the end of it if I left them out.) Bad guy the Penguin would join Batman, Catwoman, and the Joker, who would already be in the public domain, so someone writing public-domain Batman would be able to add a Penguin storyline.

Beloved children's books Curious George and Make Way for Ducklings would become public domain today. So would Mother Courage and Her Children, Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, The Screwtape Letters, Evil Under the Sun, Between The Acts, My Theodosia, and What Makes Sammy Run? So would two personal favorites of mine: Borges's The Garden of Forking Paths and Nabokov's first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

In music, we would hit another motherlode of American standards: "Blues in the Night," "Baby Mine," "Chattanooga Choo-choo" and "The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy," "All That Meat and No Potatoes," "God Bless the Child," "Deep in the Heart of Texas," "I Could Write a Book," "I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)," "Knock Me a Kiss," "Introduction to a Waltz," "Let's Get Away from It All," "So Near and Yet So Far," "Winter Weather," and, of course, the song that I believe should be our national anthem, "Take the 'A' Train." And for classical music fans, works by Bartok, Barber, Britten, Copland, Messiaen, Rachmaninoff and Schumann would all become free for public use.

But clearly, Congress has decided that works created in 1941 just haven't been under copyright long enough. Has anybody made any money off "Take the 'A' Train" yet? Or off Wonder Woman? We're just going to have to wait another twenty years for these intellectual properties to become public properties, or to have Congress pass another law keeping them private. The smart money is on the extension.

If not for the 1976 Copyright Act:

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird would enter public domain today under the laws that governed its initial publication. So would Updike's Run, Rabbit and Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham. Likewise The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor, The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case, Sylvia Plath's Colossus and Other Poems, and Walter M. Miller's science fiction classic A Canticle for Leibowitz. It would be a banner year for public-domain drama: Rhinoceros, A Man for All Seasons, Pinter's The Caretaker, Albee's The Sandbox, and the stage version of Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight. 

But it would be an even bigger year for classic movies: Spartacus, Psycho, The Apartment, La Dolce Vita, BUtterfield 8 and The Magnificent Seven would all enter public domain. So would Inherit the Wind, The Alamo, the original Ocean's 11, Exodus, The Bad Sleep Well, Elmer Gantry, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Hell Bent for Leather, the Vincent Price House of Usher and Roger Corman Little Shop of Horrors, The Swiss Family Robinson, Where the Boys Are, and The Unforgiven.

Plenty of Broadway musicals would enter public domain this year, too: Camelot, Oliver!, Bye-Bye Birdie, The Fantasticks, Flower Drum Song, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. (That, Lin-Manuel, is what a Tony awards night with some suspense looks like.)

A huge number of pop hits would also become public domain today, exactly as they were expected to when they debuted. Crooner favorite "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" would leave copyright along with "Chain Gang," "Apache," "Calendar Girl," "Cathy's Clown," "I Gotta Know," "I'll Be There," "It's Now or Never," "Money (That's What I Want)," "Only the Lonely," "Spanish Harlem," "You're Sixteen," "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?," "When Will I Be Loved," "The Twist," and "Save the Last Dance for Me." Pretty good jukebox. Also the novelty songs "Alley-Oop," and "Itsy-Bitsy-Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini," for anyone still interested in them. There would also be a good deal of interesting classical music, maybe most importantly Shostakovich's string quartets 7 and 8 and Messiaen's Chronochromie.

But all of those works will stay firmly in the hands of Sony, Disney, Time Warner, etc., until at least 2056. Someone needs another 39 years of royalties from Camelot, evidently, which would clearly be more productive than just letting people do Camelot, or even alter Camelot.

The good news is that the public domain clock, which has not ticked since January 1, 1979, is set to start ticking again two years from today, on January 1, 2019. On that day, if Congress does not intervene again, works published in 1923 will become free to the public. (Whose woods these are I think I know: They'll likely keep them private, though). Expect a bill to be before Congress before 2018 is over, and write to your representative and senators to tell them that sometimes, art has been in private hands long enough.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog