| Title | A Massive Amount of Iconic Works Will Enter the Public Domain on New Year’s Eve | |
| Date | Monday December 31 2018, @07:49PM | |
| Author | takyon | |
| Topic | ||
| from the promote-the-useful-arts dept. | ||
From Motherboard
When the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve, movies, songs, and books created in the United States in 1923—even beloved cartoons such as Felix the Cat—will be eligible for anyone to adapt, repurpose, or distribute as they please.
A 20-year freeze on copyright expirations has prevented a cache of 1923 works from entering the public domain, including Paramount Pictures' The Ten Commandments, Charlie Chaplin's The Pilgrim, and novels by Aldous Huxley.
Such a massive release of iconic works is unprecedented, experts say—especially in the digital age, as the last big dump predated Google.
In 2013, Paul Heald, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, conducted a survey of books for sale on Amazon. He found that more books were for sale from the 1880s than the 1980s.
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printed from SoylentNews, A Massive Amount of Iconic Works Will Enter the Public Domain on New Year’s Eve on 2026-02-06 19:24:50