From The Public Domain Review:
Another year dawns… and another bevy of works dust off their copyright and emerge fresh-faced, full of hope, into the elysian plains of the public domain! On this year’s Public Domain Day (which falls each January 1st) we welcome, in lots of countries around the world, the works of two titans of 20th-century art, Frida Kahlo and Henri Matisse, and in the US a handful of seminal books including William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain, but there are three main types of copyright term for historical works which cover most cases. For these three systems, newly entering the public domain today are:
- works by people who died in 1954, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (relevant in UK, most of the EU, and South America);
- works by people who died in 1974, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (relevant to most of Africa and Asia);
I added The Public Domain Review’s blog to my Feedly feed earlier this year. As someone who has spent so much of his life in publishing, and still thinks of himself as a publisher, I find this publication utterly edifying and wholly charming.
