Posts Tagged ‘copyright’
“The public domain is the basis for our art, our science, and our self-understanding. It is the raw material from which we make new inventions and create new cultural works.”*…
From Nancy Drew to Animal Crackers to The Maltese Falcon, 1930’s greatest works enter the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026. Aaron Moss counsels us to expect celebration, confusion, and at least one Betty Boop slasher film…
The weather’s getting colder, the nights are getting longer, and Hollywood has decided Betty Boop would be more marketable as a serial killer. It can only mean one thing: Public Domain Day 2026 is upon us.
Regular observers of copyright law’s favorite holiday know the drill: on January 1, 2026, a new crop of creative works from 1930 (along with sound recordings from 1925) will enter the public domain in the United States—ready to be remixed, recycled, or repurposed into B-grade horror films and ill-advised erotica.
This year’s film class is stacked with classics: Howard Hughes’s aviation epic Hell’s Angels (Jean Harlow’s screen debut and, at the time, the most expensive movie ever made); The Big Trail, featuring John Wayne in his first starring role; Greta Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie; Bing Crosby’s film debut in King of Jazz; and 1930 Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front. There’s plenty of comedy too, including the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, Laurel and Hardy’s Another Fine Mess, and Soup to Nuts, best remembered for featuring an early iteration of the Three Stooges.
Among the standout literary works in the Public Domain Day Class of 2026 are heavyweights like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Edna Ferber’s bestseller Cimarron, and Evelyn Waugh’s champagne-soaked satire Vile Bodies. Children’s literature fans can look forward to Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, Watty Piper’s The Little Engine That Could, and Elizabeth Coatsworth’s Newbery Medal winner The Cat Who Went to Heaven.
Not to take anything away from Hammett’s Sam Spade, but it’s an especially strong year for female detectives—both young and old. The earliest Nancy Drew mysteries from 1930 hit the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026, as does the first outing of the genteel Miss Marple in Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage. Maybe they can team up to solve the mystery of why Hollywood is only interested in using public domain characters to make schlocky horror films.
In the world of comics and animation, two Disney shorts featuring early versions of Pluto are also set to enter the public domain. The future canine star first appeared as an unnamed bloodhound in 1930’s The Chain Gang before resurfacing later that year as Minnie Mouse’s pet “Rover” in The Picnic. He wouldn’t officially become Mickey’s dog Pluto until 1931’s The Moose Hunt—a film set to enter the U.S. public domain in 2027…
Read on for a rundown of more film, characters, and music that’s about to be more freely available: “Public Domain Day 2026 Is Coming: Here’s What to Know,” from @copyrightlately.bsky.social.
* James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
The Holidays are upon us, and with them, (R)D’s annual solstice hiatus. Regular service will resume on or around January 2; in the meantime (and in lieu of an almanac entry), two seasonal offerings.
First, a collection of pieces from JSTOR: “Winter Holidays“…
December means the winter holidays are upon us: Solstice, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, St. Stephen’s Day, and New Year’s Eve, with all your favorite wintertime traditions. Celebrate with some seasonal scholarship below. All stories contain free links to the supporting academic research on JSTOR. Happy Holidays!
And then, with your correspondent’s seasonal best, two timely tunes:
“I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation”*…
Last Wednesday was a big day. Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain explain…
On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 [entered] the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They [are] free for all to copy, share, and build upon. 2025 marks a milestone: all of the books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’ in the Rain. Below is just a handful of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2025. To find more material from 1929, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.
The title of Faulkner’s novel was itself taken from a public domain work, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and its lament over the seeming meaningless of life. “Life…is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”…
… When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable both access to and preservation of cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. 1929 was a long time ago and the vast majority of works from that year are not commercially available. You couldn’t buy them, or even find them, if you wanted. When they enter the public domain in 2025, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.
The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. You could think of it as the yin to copyright’s yang. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But the United States Constitution requires that those rights last only for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! It is part of copyright’s ecosystem. The point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so.
How does the public domain feed creativity? Here are just two examples from 2024. You may have enjoyed the film Wicked in 2024. Like many of its predecessors, it is based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books, and it offers origin stories for the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good. From the literary realm, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huckleberry’s friend who is an escaped slave. The novel won the 2024 National Book Award and Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. As summed up by a New York Times review: “‘Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.” Mark Twain famously wanted copyright to last forever—if he had his wish, would his heirs have sued Everett? Thankfully, we did not have to find out, and Everett could publish James without such litigation…
More about the works that have entered the domain and about the underlying copyright regime: “Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924!”
Pair with the analogically related “Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia” from @molly.wiki.
And a gentle prod: now (indeed, any time) is a good time to support the Internet Archive.
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As we acclaim access, we might note that today is a special day for Baker Street Irregulars the world over, Sherlock Holmes Day. Sherlockian Carl Thiel (and here):
Morley, incidentally, believed the year of Holmes’s birth was 1853. Subsequent tradition has settled on 1854, largely due to the fact that in the story ‘His Last Bow’ (which takes place in August 1914) Holmes is described as a ‘man of sixty.’
Although Holmes’s date of birth is nowhere mentioned in the Canon (ie, all 60 stories written by Doyle), the 6th of January was first suggested by Christopher Morley (1890-1957) in his ‘Bowling Green’ column in The Saturday Review of Literature in 1933. Through the efforts of the Baker Street Irregulars, and largely the influence of William S Baring-Gould’s 1962 biography of Holmes (Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Biography of the World’s First Consulting Detective), January 6th has become the traditional birthday of the great detective.
Morley wrote: ‘I have not looked up the data, but if, as an astrologer has suggested, Sherlock Holmes was most likely born in January, some observance is due. Therefore, if the matter has never been settled, I nominate January 6th (the date of this issue of the Saturday Review) as his birthday.
The Sherlock Holmes stories have, of course, flourished in the public domain for years…
In the 60 original stories, Holmes was depicted in illustrations as wearing a deerstalker cap in only four. Nowhere does Doyle mention that type of headgear.
image source
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change”*…
If an AI-infused web is the future, what can we learn from the past? Jeff Jarvis has some provocative thoughts…
The Gutenberg Parenthesis—the theory that inspired my book of the same name—holds that the era of print was a grand exception in the course of history. I ask what lessons we may learn from society’s development of print culture as we leave it for what follows the connected age of networks, data, and intelligent machines—and as we negotiate the fate of such institutions as copyright, the author, and mass media as they are challenged by developments such as generative AI.
Let’s start from the beginning…
In examining the half-millennium of print’s history, three moments in time struck me:
- After Johannes Gutenberg’s development of movable type in the 1450s in Europe (separate from its prior invention in China and Korea), it took a half-century for the book as we now know it to evolve out of its scribal roots—with titles, title pages, and page numbers. It took another century, until this side and that of 1600, before there arose tremendous innovation with print: the invention of the modern novel with Cervantes, the essay with Montaigne, a market for printed plays with Shakespeare, and the newspaper.
- It took another century before a business model for print at last emerged with copyright, which was enacted in Britain in 1710, not to protect authors but instead to transform literary works into tradable assets, primarily for the benefit of the still-developing industry of publishing.
- And it was one more century—after 1800—before major changes came to the technology of print: the steel press, stereotyping (to mold complete pages rather than resetting type with every edition), steam-powered presses, paper made from abundant wood pulp instead of scarce rags, and eventually the marvelous Linotype, eliminating the job of the typesetter. Before the mechanization and industrialization of print, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in America was 4,000 (the size of a healthy Substack newsletter these days). Afterwards, mass media, the mass market, and the idea of the mass were born alongside the advertising to support them.
One lesson in this timeline is that the change we experience today, which we think is moving fast, is likely only the beginning. We are only a quarter century past the introduction of the commercial web browser, which puts us at about 1480 in Gutenberg years. There could be much disruption and invention still ahead. Another lesson is that many of the institutions we assume are immutable—copyright, the concept of creativity as property, mass media and its scale, advertising and the attention economy—are not forever. That is to say that we can reconsider, reinvent, reject, or replace them as need and opportunity present…
Read on for his suggestion for a reinvention of copyright: “Gutenberg’s lessons in the era of AI,” from @jeffjarvis via @azeem in his valuable newsletter @ExponentialView.
* Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
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As we contemplate change, we might spare a thought for Jan Hus. A Czech theologian and philosopher who became a Church reformer, he was burned at the stake as a heretic (for condemning indulgences and the Crusades) on this date in 1415. His teachings (which largely echoed those of Wycliffe) had a strong influence, over a century later, on Martin Luther, helping inspire the Reformation… which was fueled by Gutenberg’s technology, which had been developed and begun to spread in the meantime.
“I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!”*…
After this post, your correspondent begins his annual Holiday Hiatus, so let me pass along a gift. Regular service will resume on January 2; meantime, thanks to you all for reading– and Happy Holidays!
Ladies and Gentlemen, the remarkable Tom Lehrer…
Between the… Weird Al biopic and and Kelly Bachman and Dylan Adler’s new comedy album, Rape Victims Are Horny Too, parody songsters have rarely been such a central part of the cultural zeitgeist. Yet comedy musicians have been trailblazing for much longer than we may realize, and before the popularity of Weird Al, or even Bo Burnham, Adam Sandler, and Steve Martin, there was Tom Lehrer.
Lehrer is perhaps best known for “The Elements,” an impossibly fast and impossibly tongue-twisty song that consists of all the periodic elements put to the tune of a “Major-General’s Song” from Pirates of Penzance. This is a classic Tom Lehrer song, so classic in fact that Daniel Radcliffe’s rendition of it on The Graham Norton Show helped score him the role of Weird Al, who has noted Lehrer as a major comedic influence. This full circle loop only emphasizes how important Lehrer was and continues to be in the musical comedy scene, and diving into his diverse oeuvre solidifies just how innovative he was…
“Tom Lehrer Deserves Your Attention” (source of the photo above)
And it’s now easier than ever for you to pay him that attention: the remarkable Mr. Lehrer is also remarkably generous. Last month, a new web site appeared, the home page of which explains…
I, Tom Lehrer, and the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions:
All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain.
The latter includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages.
Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included….
The site contains all of his lyrics, and free streaming and downloadable versions of all of his albums– a satirical gold mine: “Songs and Lyrics by Tom Lehrer.”
* Tom Lehrer
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As we soak ourselves in satire, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986 that Fran Oz’s film Little Shop of Horrors premiered. Based on the Off-Broadway musical adaptation of the 1960 original Roger Corman movie, it was a huge success with critics and a modest success with audiences on release, but has since become cult film.
As Oz’s friend and Muppet colleague Jim Henson said, “the lip sync on the plant in that film is just absolutely amazing.”
“There are only two different types of companies in the world: those that have been breached and know it and those that have been breached and don’t know it.”*…
Enrique Mendoza Tincopa (and here) with a visualization of what’s on offer on the dark web and what it costs…
Did you know that the internet you’re familiar with is only 10% of the total data that makes up the World Wide Web?
The rest of the web is hidden from plain sight, and requires special access to view. It’s known as the Deep Web, and nestled far down in the depths of it is a dark, sometimes dangerous place, known as the darknet, or Dark Web…
Visual Capitalist
For a larger version, click here
And for a look at the research that underlies the graphic, click here.
What’s your personal information worth? “The Dark Web Price Index 2022,” from @DatavizAdventuR via @VisualCap.
(Image at top: source)
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As we harden our defenses, we might recall that it was on this date in 1994 that arguments began in the case of United States vs. David LaMacchia, in which David LaMacchia stood accused of Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud. He had allegedly operated the “Cynosure” bulletin board system (BBS) for six weeks, to hosting pirated software on Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) servers. Federal prosecutors didn’t directly charge LaMacchia with violating copyright statutes; rather they chose to charge him under a federal wire fraud statute that had been enacted in 1952 to prevent the use of telephone systems for interstate fraud. But the court ruled that as he had no commercial motive (he was not charging for the shared software), copyright violation could not be prosecuted under the wire fraud statute; LaMacchia was found not guilty– giving rise to what became known as “the LaMacchia loophole”… and spurring legislative action to try to close that gap.
Background documents from the case are here.
The MIT student paper, covering the case (source)
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