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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @07:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the free-the-mouse dept.

January 1st is Public Domain Day. Throughout the year, works for which copyright has expired enter the public domain and become available for anyone to use in any way. In the US, copyright was originally only for 14 years with an option to renew for an additional 14. Now it is the life of the author plus 70 years. It is described in the US constitution under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 as having the purpose of promoting science and useful arts. However, with "life+70" that promotion is not able to happen, the stream of freely available ideas and resources has been forcibly dried up. So every New Year's Day, Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain publishes a list on what we would have had with sane copyright under the old rules:

Public Domain Day is January 1st of every year. If you live in Canada or New Zealand, January 1st 2018 would be the day when the works of René Magritte, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Jean Toomer, Edward Hopper, and Alice B. Toklas enter the public domain. So would the musical compositions of John Coltrane, Billy Strayhorn, Paul Whiteman, Otis Redding, and Woody Guthrie. Canadians can now add a wealth of books, poems, paintings, and musical works by these authors to online archives, without asking permission or violating the law. And in Europe, the works of Hugh Lofting (the Doctor DoLittle books), William Moulton Marston (creator of Wonder Woman!), and Emma Orczy (the Scarlet Pimpernel series) will emerge into the public domain, where anyone can use them in their own books or movies. (You can find a great celebration of some of these authors here.)

What is entering the public domain in the United States? Not a single published work. Once again, no published works are entering our public domain this year.

Source : Public Domain Day: January 1, 2018

via BoingBoing


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