Something is afoot with copyright this Public Domain Day | John Naughton
On New Year’s Day, copyright in the US expires on a new clutch of artistic works. But shady legal shenanigans mean it’s a little overdue…
Here’s a reason to be cheerful this morning: it’s Public Domain Day, ie the day on which a new batch of hitherto copyrighted works comes out of copyright and enters the US public domain – the zone that consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy.
Among the works liberated for the delight of American citizens this morning are: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle; Fritz Lang’s seminal science-fiction film Metropolis; Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller; and compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. The interesting thing is that these were originally supposed to enter the public domain in 2003, but as Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain puts it, “before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years”.
