This New Year’s Day, for the first time in 21 years, new works will
enter the public domain in America: the Class of 2019 was all creating
in 1923, and has been locked in copyright for 96 years.
When Disney successfully lobbied Congress to extend copyright by 20
years in 1998, it stopped the clock on the public domain. 20 years ago,
everything from 1922 became public. The next year, and the year after,
and every year until 2019, nothing else entered the public domain.
As Glenn Fleishman writes in Smithsonian, the result is a
weirdly skewed public perception of the 1920s. 1922 was the year “the
world broke in two,” in the words of Willa Cather. It was the year of Ulysses, The Wasteland and Harlem Shadows.
Those works have been ours to use and change and copy and play with for
20 years. The works from the next year – Robert Frost’s “Stopping By
the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Conan Doyle’s “Our American Adventure,”
Willis Richardson’s “The Chip Woman’s Fortune,” have been locked away
and languishing, waiting for Jan 1, 2019.
If this pleases you as much as it does me, and you happen to be near San
Francisco on January 25, please join me, Larry Lessig, Creative Commons
and the Internet Archive for A Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain.
Fleishman adds, “I wrote a parody of one of the 1923 works, Frost’s
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” as a side project The bit about
“fifty-one” refers to the fact that the poem’s copyright may have been
improperly renewed in 1951, thus leaving it in the public domain for the
last 67 years — even as the Frost estate and publishers have rigorously
defended it (as noted in the article), including in Eldred v.
Ashcroft.“
