Public Domain Day: January 1, 2010

“Public Domain Day. January 1st every year. If you live in
Europe, January 1st 2010 would be the day when the works of Freud
and Yeats and hundreds of other authors ranging from Havelock Ellis
to Zane Grey emerge into the public domain1 — where they are
freely available for anyone to use, republish, translate or
transform. You could copy the songs and photos, share the movies,
make a digital library of the books. Your school could create an
interactive volume of Yeats’s poems, or publish that cheap
educational edition of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents.
You could translate Ellis into French, even make a new film based
on Grey’s classic Westerns. Or you could just send a copy to a
friend — without asking permission or violating the law.

“On the first day of each year, Public Domain Day celebrates the
moment when copyrights expire. The films, photos, books and
symphonies whose copyright term has finished become “free as the
air to common use.” The end of the copyright on these works means
that they enter the public domain, completing the copyright
bargain. Copyright gives creators — authors, musicians,
filmmakers, photographers — exclusive rights over their works
for a limited time. The copyright encourages the creators to create
and the publishers to distribute — that’s a very good thing.
But when the copyright ends, the work enters the public domain
— to join the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart, the
books of Dickens — the material of our collective
culture.”

Complete
Story