Works Entering the Public Domain on Jan 1st

The public domain is a spring for inspiration and inventiveness. Copyright is not only about protecting a developer’s creations and legal rights, it also promotes an exchange of ideas which can give rise to new creations. Authors’ rights are paramount, and copyright laws provide a manner for an orderly and fair trade of ideas.

However, these laws also ensure that those rights only last for a limited time, 75 years. When a copyright expires, the works go into the public domain, where future creators can legally build upon past legacies. This reimagining of stories allows for some of our favorite books to be made into fan fiction, films, and adapted into plays and songs without limits.

This lack of limits can be both exhilarating and shocking. In one of the most surprising public domain adaptations from 2022, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh was turned into a slasher film and it wasn’t the only surprising reimagination project for Pooh and the gang. Toilet paper company, Who Gives a Crap, launched a PR campaign in order to raised awareness about deforestation.

As Theo Epstein, public figure and Major League Baseball executive shared, “Once you thrust yourself out there in the public domain, it’s really hard to retreat, to say no or reclaim that certain part of your life as private.”

 

Very soon the public domain will welcome some new big names, including Agatha Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue Train, which was the basis for a episode of Poirot in 2005. Feminist classic novel, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, which depicts a sexually liberated character, which was unusual for the time it was written (1928), is also on the list.