Wednesday, January 02, 2019

January 1, 2019: Public Domain Day

Yesterday published works from 1923 entered the public domain.  Yes, it is was Public Domain Day for real!  This article from  the Duke School of Law Center for the Study of the Public Domain gives a wonderful overview of what is now available. The works include:
As the Center's article states about the information they provide:
In an abundance of caution, our list above only includes works where we were actually able to track down the notice and renewal data suggesting that they are indeed still in-copyright until 2019. We’ve also compiled—to the best of our research capabilities—a fuller spreadsheet showing other renewed works from 1923. You can find it here. But we want to emphasize that this is only a partial collection; many more works are entering the public domain as well, but we could not find the legal minutia to confirm their copyright status. 
Yes, knowing when a work was indeed published is important, as well as if it complied with the copyright rules of that era.  Some works had already entered the public domain from 1923.  Some works aren't yet in the public domain.  It's complicated, but that's okay because the public domain really did get bigger!

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