Tons of Great Books, Movies, and Music Just Entered the Public Domain
January 1, 2020, was Public Domain Day, when items from 1924 become public domain.
Countless books and musical works are joined by more and more silent films.
Copyright in the U.S. has been artificially extended to nearly 100 years by corporate lobbyists.
On January 1, a new batch of copyrighted materials entered the public domain, including books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (the creator of Tarzan) and plays by Eugene O’Neill. “Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin and “Fascinating Rhythm” by George and Ira Gershwin have entered the public domain, too.
Many of the newly released titles are international, like E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India or the English translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian masterpiece We—but these books have been available online, sometimes for years already, because of lapsed original copyrights in other places or other complexities.
For 20 years between 1998 and 2018, the U.S. release of public domain works was suspended following a grim corporate lobbying campaign by the Walt Disney Corporation. Steamboat Willie, released in 1928, marks the beginning of an avalanche of Disney materials that will begin entering the public domain.
Disney has become one of the world’s richest and most powerful brands in part by using the public domain, in the form of folk stories and myths from around the world, to create new works they can then copyright. When they successfully lobbied to extend the U.S. copyright length to 95 years, the U.S. joined the extreme high-end of global copyright law. But thankfully, that number is not likely to go up again.
Here are the items Duke Law School highlighted:
Films:
Sherlock, Jr.
The Navigator
Girl Shy
Hot Water
Peter Pan
The Sea Hawk
Secrets
He Who Gets Slapped
Dante’s Inferno
Books:
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Some Do Not… by Ford Madox Ford
Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O’Neill
Old New York by Edith Wharton
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne
Doctor Dolittle’s Circus by Hugh Lofting
Tarzan and the Ant Men (Tarzan #10) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie
The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany
Music:
Rhapsody in Blue
Fascinating Rhythm
Oh, Lady Be Good
Lazy
Jealous Hearted Blues
Santa Claus Blues
Nobody’s Sweetheart
There are some other shining stars and items of interest in the massive record of copyrights for 1924. (It’s 1,500 pages long, so this is a random sample of the good stuff a dogged investigator will discover.)
The Box-Car Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
“The Rats in the Walls” by H.P. Lovecraft
So Big by Edna Ferber, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Welded by Eugene O’Neill, the playwright’s worst work
The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain
My Further Disillusionment in Russia by Emma Goldman
The Gift of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
The Ship of Ishtar by Abraham Merritt
The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley
The Plastic Age by Percy Marks, which became a Clara Bow film
The Little Orphan Annie comic, long after a book in the 1800s
The Youngest by Philip Barry, author of The Philadelphia Story
Famous Figures of the Old Testament by William Jennings Bryan
If you’re feeling inspired, Itch.io is hosting the second annual Public Domain Day game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1924. Participants can create and enter browser games using Twine, ink, or whatever else they can manage, or they can make traditional tabletop (“analog”) RPGs or board games.
The goal of limited copyright terms has always been to return great ideas to the public imagination after a fair proprietary window for their creators—start planning your Steamboat Willie game for 2024.
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