Every year, Jennifer Jenkins and Jamie Boyle from the Duke Center for the Public Domain compile a “Public Domain Day” list (previously) that highlights the works that are not
entering the public domain in America, thanks to the 1998 Sonny Bono
Copyright Term Extension Act, which hit the pause button on Americans’
ability to freely use their artistic treasures for two decades – a list
that also included the notable works entering the public domain in more
sensible countries of the Anglophere, like Canada and the UK, where
copyright “only” lasted for 50 years after the author’s death.
Even as Canada’s public domain has radically contracted, America’s has, for the first, time, opened.
So this year’s American Public Domain Day List
is, for the first time in 20 years, not a work melancholy alternate
history, but rather a celebration of works that Americans are newly
given access to without restriction or payment, for free re-use and
adaptation, in the spirit of such classics as Snow White, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, All You Need is Love, and more.
Films * Safety Last!, directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, featuring Harold Lloyd
* The Ten Commandments, directed by Cecil B. DeMille
* The Pilgrim, directed by Charlie Chaplin
* Our Hospitality, directed by Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone
* The Covered Wagon, directed by James Cruze
* Scaramouche, directed by Rex Ingram
Books * Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Golden Lion
* Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links
* Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis
* e.e. cummings, Tulips and Chimneys
* Robert Frost, New Hampshire
* Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
* Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay
* D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo
* Bertrand and Dora Russell, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization
* Carl Sandberg, Rootabaga Pigeons
* Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front
* P.G. Wodehouse, works including The Inimitable Jeeves and Leave it to Psmith
* Viginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
Music * Yes! We Have No Bananas, w.&m. Frank Silver & Irving Cohn
* Charleston, w.&m. Cecil Mack & James P. Johnson
* London Calling! (musical), by Noel Coward
* Who’s Sorry Now, w. Bert Kalmar & Harry Ruby, m. Ted Snyder
* Songs by “Jelly Roll” Morton including Grandpa’s Spells, The
Pearls, and Wolverine Blues (w. Benjamin F. Spikes & John C. Spikes;
m. Ferd “Jelly Roll” Morton)
* Works by Bela Bartok including the Violin Sonata No. 1 and the Violin Sonata No. 2
* Tin Roof Blues, m. Leon Roppolo, Paul Mares, George Brunies, Mel
Stitzel, & Benny Pollack
(There were also compositions from 1923 by other well-known artists
including Louis Armstrong, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, WC Handy,
Oscar Hammerstein, Gustav Holst, Al Jolson, Jerome Kern, and John
Phillip Sousa; though their most famous works were from other years.)
And as great as that list is, it’s hardly a patch on the amazing works we’d be inheriting
if the Sonny Bono law hadn’t been passed and the 1978 law was still on
the books – works whose authors fully expected them to be in the public
domain as of tomorrow:
Books * Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
* Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
* Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
* Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
* James Baldwin, Another Country
* Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
* Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
* Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
* Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
* Michael Harrington, The Other America
* Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
* J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World
* Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
* Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
* Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
* Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
* Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
* Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl
* Ingri d’Aulaire and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
Movies * Lawrence of Arabia
* The Longest Day
* The Manchurian Candidate
* Dr. No
* Jules and Jim
* Sanjuro
* Birdman of Alcatraz
* Mutiny on the Bounty
* Days of Wine and Roses
* How the West Was Won
Music * Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream), by Cindy Walker, performed by Roy Orbison
* Blowin’ in the Wind, Bob Dylan
* Watermelon Man, Herbie Hancock (from his first album, Takin’ Off)
* Twistin’ the Night Away, Sam Cooke
* You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover and You Shook Me, Willie Dixon
* Surfin’ Safari, The Beach Boys
* Songs from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Stephen Sondheim
* Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream), Cindy Walker
* Big Girls Don’t Cry, Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio
* Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield
* Little Boxes, Malvina Reynolds
* The Loco-Motion, Gerry Goffin and Carole King
* Soldier Boy, Luther Dixon and Florence Greenberg
And, as Jenkins and Boyle point out, the largely hidden casualty of
copyright term extension is the scholarship and research published in
academic journals, who paid nothing for these works, and who have locked
them up for decades to come:
Armstrong Zoom, a northeastern US ISP with about a million subscribers,
has sent its customers warnings that they have been accused of copyright
infringement, and that subsequent accusations would lead to having
their network connections slowed to the point of uselessness, which
could impair their ability to control their internet-connected
thermostats.
In the regions in which Armstrong Zoom operates, a malfunctioning
thermostat in winter could result in frozen pipes, floods, and death of
pets and even people.
Note that the punishments Armstrong Zoom is threatening have no due
process, and the customers are considered guilty without even the chance
to prove themselves innocent.
This New Year’s Day, for the first time in 21 years, new works will
enter the public domain in America: the Class of 2019 was all creating
in 1923, and has been locked in copyright for 96 years.
When Disney successfully lobbied Congress to extend copyright by 20
years in 1998, it stopped the clock on the public domain. 20 years ago,
everything from 1922 became public. The next year, and the year after,
and every year until 2019, nothing else entered the public domain.
As Glenn Fleishman writes in Smithsonian, the result is a
weirdly skewed public perception of the 1920s. 1922 was the year “the
world broke in two,” in the words of Willa Cather. It was the year of Ulysses, The Wasteland and Harlem Shadows.
Those works have been ours to use and change and copy and play with for
20 years. The works from the next year – Robert Frost’s “Stopping By
the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Conan Doyle’s “Our American Adventure,”
Willis Richardson’s “The Chip Woman’s Fortune,” have been locked away
and languishing, waiting for Jan 1, 2019.
If this pleases you as much as it does me, and you happen to be near San
Francisco on January 25, please join me, Larry Lessig, Creative Commons
and the Internet Archive for A Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain.
Fleishman adds, “I wrote a parody of one of the 1923 works, Frost’s
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” as a side project The bit about
“fifty-one” refers to the fact that the poem’s copyright may have been
improperly renewed in 1951, thus leaving it in the public domain for the
last 67 years — even as the Frost estate and publishers have rigorously
defended it (as noted in the article), including in Eldred v.
Ashcroft.“
