Everybody's Libraries

I’m glad we’ve reached a new Public Domain Day, and that the works I’ve been featuring in my #PublicDomainDayCountdown, and many more, are now free to copy and reuse. I’ve been posting about works joining the public domain in the United States, which include sound recordings published in 1925, and other works published in 1930 that had maintained their copyrights. (Numerous works from 1930, and later, that had to renew their copyrights, and did not, were already in the public domain, though many of the best-known works did renew copyrights as required.) This is the eighth straight year Americans have seen a year’s worth of works join the public domain, after a 20-year freeze following a 1998 copyright extension.

I intend my countdown not just to celebrate the works joining the public domain, but also to celebrate what people have done with those works. In some posts, I note later creations based on those works. In nearly all my posts, I link to things that people have written about those works. Like the works themselves, those responses may have flaws or quirks, but I value them as human reactions to human creations. Whether they’re reviews, personal blog posts, professionally written essays, scholarly analyses, or Wikipedia articles, they’re created by people who encountered an interesting work and cared about it enough to craft a response to it and share it with the world. Those shared responses in turn pique my interest in the writers and the works.

It wasn’t always easy for me to find such responses online. Sometimes I’d go searching for responses to a promising-sounding work, and only find sales listings on e-commerce sites, social media posts not easily linkable or displayable without logging into a commercial platform, paywalled articles that many of my readers can’t view, or generic-sounding pages that read like they were generated by a large language model or a content farm, but not by anyone who I could clearly tell cared about or even read the work in question. Some works I initially hoped to feature got left off my countdown, replaced by other works where I could more readily link to an interesting response.

The people publishing the responses I link to are often swimming against a strong current online. Many online writing systems– including the one I’ve been writing these posts on— are now urging their users to “improve” their posts by letting “AI” write them. Some writers may be tempted to allow it, when facing an impending deadline or writer’s block or anxiety, even when the costs can include muffling one’s own voice, signing onto falsehoods confidently stated by a stochastic text generator, or abusively exploiting existing content and services. Other writers may feel pushed to put their work behind paywalls or other access controls that makes them less likely to be plagiarized or aggressively crawled by those same “AI” systems. And most writers, myself included, find it easy to dash off a quick short take on a social media platform, be quickly gratified by some “like”s, and then have it forgotten. It’s harder to take the time to craft something longer or more thought-out that will be readable for years, and that might take much longer for us to hear appreciated. The easy alternatives can discourage people from devoting their time to better, more lasting creations.

As I’ve noted before, both copyright and the public domain serve important purposes in encouraging the creation, dissemination, sharing, and reuse of literature and art. One reason I write my public domain posts is to promote a better balance between them, particularly in encouraging shorter copyright lengths to benefit both original creators and the public. Similarly, as I’ve noted in another recent post, I value both human creation and automated processes, but I increasingly see a need to improve the balance between those as well, especially as some corporations aggressively push “generative AI”. While I appreciate many ways in which automation can help us create and manage our work, I treasure the humanity that people thoughtfully put into the creation of literature and art of all kinds, and the human responses that those creations elicit.

Today I’m thankful for all of the people, most no longer with us, who made the works that are joining the public domain today. I’m thankful for the new opportunities we have to share and build on those works now that they’re public domain. I’m thankful to all the people who have responded to those works, whether as brief reactions or as new works as ambitious as the works they respond to. And I hope you’ll keeping making and sharing those responses with the world when you can. I look forward to reading them, and perhaps linking to them in future posts.

Ninety-five (or 100) years is a very long time for copyrights to last. But Olaf Stapledon saw a much longer future for us in Last and First Men (reviewed here and here). His book tells a story of successive human species over the next 2 billion years.

Stapledon died in 1950, and his work is already public domain most places outside the US. Tomorrow a copy in Australia will be among the first books to be relisted in my new books listing, finally free for all. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Yale’s 1905 commencement ceremonies included a honorary doctorate for British composer Edward Elgar, and a portion of his first “Pomp and Circumstance” march. It’s been a staple of graduation processions ever since. The full suite of five marches that Elgar finished takes about 30 minutes to play, but took nearly three decades to complete. The first march has long been in the US public domain; the last, published in 1930, joins it there in two days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

David Seubert writes that more than 2500 records from 1925 digitized by the UC Santa Barbara Library will soon be freely downloadable there. A full listing of these recordings is online (though note that recordings made in 1925 but not released that year won’t be public domain yet).

A highlight of the collection is “St. Louis Blues”, sung by Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong on cornet. One of the top selling records of 1925, it will be public domain in 3 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Marlene Dietrich enjoyed success on stage and screen in 1920s Berlin, but became an international star in 1930. That year she came to the United States to star in Morocco alongside Gary Cooper. Her performance was nominated for an Academy Award. So was the direction by Josef von Sternberg, who also directed her in The Blue Angel and several other films. Morocco was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1992, and will be inducted into the public domain in 4 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Struggle over academic freedom in Texas state universities has a long history. Today it’s often over race and gender; in the 1940s, it was over things like John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy. When the University of Texas Board of Regents banned it from classrooms, university president Homer Price Rainey objected to their interference. After they fired him, thousands protested on campus. The first part of the USA trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, joins the public domain in 5 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

In 1925 the Associated Glee Clubs of America put on a concert like no other. 15 choral groups, with over 850 singers in all, came together in New York’s Metropolitan Opera House to sing a program broadcast on radio across America. Portions were electrically recorded, including “Adeste Fideles”, where the audience of 4000 joined in the carol. Lloyd Winstead writes about the record, which is now in the National Recording Registry, and joins the public domain in 7 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Moss Hart wrote the first draft of Once in a Lifetime, a comedy about Hollywood’s transition to “talkies”, as a 25-year-old unknown. Established playwright George S. Kaufman helped revise it into a Broadway hit. Steve Vineberg calls it the “the finest comedy ever written by Americans”, and discusses how it began a long successful collaboration between the two writers. Still making theatergoers laugh in the 21st century, the 1930 play joins the public domain in 8 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

Given how much “Dick and Jane” have been used sardonically, one might think Zerna Sharp’s schoolbook characters were already public domain. But you can’t copyright names, expressive style, or stock situations, and fair use allows limited copying for purposes like criticism, analysis, and parody.

In 9 days, the 1930 Elson Basic Readers introducing Dick and Jane join the public domain, and their stories’ full texts and original artwork can be reused without limit. #PublicDomainDayCountdown