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January 1, 2020 is Public Domain Day: Works From 1924 Are Open to All!

posted by takyon on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:59PM   
from the roaring-twenties dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2020/

Here are some of the works that will be entering the public domain in 2020. (To find more material from 1924, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.)

[...] Unfortunately, the fact that works from 1924 are legally available does not mean they are actually available. After 95 years, many of these works are already lost or literally disintegrating (as with old films and recordings), evidence of what long copyright terms do to the conservation of cultural artifacts. In fact, one of the items we feature below, Clark Gable's debut in White Man, apparently no longer exists. For the works that have survived, however, their long-awaited entry into the public domain is still something to celebrate. (Under the 56-year copyright term that existed until 1978, we would really have something to celebrate – works from 1963 would be entering the public domain in 2020!)

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Original Submission

• Harmonizing to what? (Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Thursday January 02 2020, @09:59PM

  by Pino P (4721) on Thursday January 02 2020, @09:59PM (#938836) Journal

  no works after 1927 will ever enter the public domain so there's at maximum three years of new PD stuff left.

  I doubt this for two reasons.

  First, the only way the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 passed constitutional muster was that it harmonized the term of copyright[1] to that of several major trading partners in the European Union. The opinion of the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft was careful to distinguish harmonization from "legislative misbehavior" intended to circumvent the "limited Times" provision of the U.S. Constitution's copyright clause. The EU's mid-1990s extension, in turn, was intended to update the underlying so-called "three-generation principle" [copyrightalliance.org] to account for the fact that parents were having children later on average. How would lawmakers distinguish another yet another term extension from "legislative misbehavior"?

  Second, in January 2018, Ars Technica ran a story stating that the Authors Guild opposes another term extension [arstechnica.com]. Do you really think Disney is going to fight the Authors Guild on this one?

  [1] At least the term for post-1977 works not "made for hire."

  Parent

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