Monday Reading is my weekly recommendation of something I’ve found thought-provoking or fascinating. Sometimes it is about something I have read. Sometimes it is about television or food or music or projects I care about supporting. Sometimes I do not send it on Monday. Please share with anyone who might like the vibes!
January 1 can only mean one thing: it’s Public Domain Day! And this year it’s, as Cory Doctorow put it, a banger, because “the late 1920s were super horny.”
Every January 1, a new crop of creative works lose their copyright protections and enter the public domain. These vary by country; the US is the sole country that goes by publication date, not the date of the creator’s death, so thousands of films and books published in 1928 enter the public domain today; in 11 days, so will recorded music from 1923.1 What does that include? Fiction by Modernists & the Bloomsbury Group set (Breton, Woolf), Harlem Renaissance writers (Du Bois, McKay), The Threepenny Opera, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and … Steamboat Wille & The Gallopin’ Gaucho, the very first Mickey & Minnie Mouse cartoons. (Here’s more information about that.)
Why is that important? Per Jennifer Jenkins of Duke Unversity:
The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. The whole point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But it also ensures that those rights last 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!
Think of all the films, cartoons, books, plays, musicals, video games, songs, and other works based on Greek mythology, or on the works of Shakespeare … Shakespeare’s works have given us everything from The Lion King and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (from Hamlet) to 10 Things I Hate About You and Kiss Me Kate (from The Taming of the Shrew) to West Side Story (from Romeo and Juliet). That is the promise of the public domain. Who knows what the works entering the public domain in 2024 might inspire? As with Shakespeare, the ability freely to reinvent these works may spur a range of creativity, from the serious to the whimsical, and in doing so allow the original artists’ legacies to endure. And of course Shakespeare himself, who predated copyright law, borrowed heavily from his predecessors. One work inspires another. That is how the public domain feeds creativity.
The Public Domain Review has a very nice roundup of works entering the public domain around the world. Happy creative remixing (or whatever)! And if you have any favorite 1928 works you’re celebrating, please let us know in the comments!
Literally every other country goes by the creator’s lifetime plus 50 or 70 years, so entire oeuvres are released around the world on January 1, and lots of things just entering the public domain here have already entered it elsewhere.