January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all!

By Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain Dessert, anyone?2023’s newly public domainworks include a song about ice cream anda film with theGuinness record for themost pies thrown(3,000). A la mode, please! Through art alone, we are able to getoutside of ourselves, to know what anothersees of a universe which is not the sameas ours, and whose landscapes wouldotherwise have remained as unknownto us as those of the moon.–Marcel Proust,Le Temps Retrouvé(My translation from the original French) A photograph of Lon Chaney in thelost filmLondon After Midnight Scenes fromMetropolis The pie fight fromBattle of the Century Pillars of Creation (NIRCam and MIRIComposite Image) from NASA and theSpace Telescope Science Institute January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all! On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. 1 They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These include Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, the German science-fiction film Metropolis and Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and a novelty song about ice cream. Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different. Here are just a few of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2023. 2 They were supposed to go into the public domain in 2003, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years. Now the wait is over. (To find more material from 1927, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries .) Books Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop Countee Cullen, Copper Sun A. A. Milne, , illustrations by E. H. Shepard Now We Are Six Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey Ernest Hemingway, (collection of short stories) Men Without Women William Faulkner, Mosquitoes Agatha Christie, The Big Four Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep Herbert Asbury, (the original 1927 publication) The Gangs of New York Franklin W. Dixon (pseudonym), (the first Hardy Boys book) The Tower Treasure Hermann Hesse, (in the original German) Der Steppenwolf Franz Kafka, (in the original German) Amerika Marcel Proust, (the final installment of Le Temps retrouvé In Search of Lost Time , in the original French) These are just a handful of the thousands of books entering the public domain in 2023. There is a lot to celebrate: a modernist masterpiece, poetry from the Harlem Renaissance, children’s verses featuring Winnie-the-Pooh and other characters, and early works from Hemingway and Faulkner. Copyright will also expire over Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes stories-you can read more about copyright over characters and the Doyle estate’s attempts to artificially extend rights over Holmes and Dr. Watson here . Movies Entering the Public Domain (directed...

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