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by jennifer jenkins, director of the duke center for the study of the public domain
You are reading: Public domain books 2022
January 1, 2022 is Public Domain Day: works from 1926 are open to all, as is a cornucopia of recorded music: some 400,000 pre-1923 sound recordings! !
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On January 1, 2022, the copyrighted works of 1926 will enter the American public domain, 1 , where anyone can copy, share, and develop them for free. this year’s lineup is impressive. includes books like a. a. winnie-the-pooh by milne, bambi by felix salten, the sun also rises by ernest hemingway, the weary blues i> by langston hughes i>, and enough rope by dorothy parker. There are scores of silent movies, including titles featuring Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Greta Garbo, famous Broadway songs, and well-known jazz standards. But that is not all. in 2022 we’ll get a bonus: some 400,000 pre-1923 sound recordings 2 will also enter the public domain! (Please note that this site only discusses US law; copyright terms in other countries are different.)
winnie the pooh is now a multi-million dollar franchise. after the original book’s copyright expires, will there be a war between the pooh brand and the public domain?
In 2022, the public domain will welcome many “firsts”: the first winnie-the-pooh book by a. a. Milne, the first published novels by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, the first books of poems by Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker. Furthermore, for the first time, thanks to a 2018 law called the Music Modernization Law, a special category of works, sound recordings, will finally begin to join other plays. in the public domain. on January 1, 2022, the doors will open for all the recordings that have been waiting in the wings. Decades of recordings made from the advent of sound recording technology to the end of 1922 (estimated at 400,000 works) will be open for legal reuse.
Why celebrate the public domain? When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. That is something Winnie-the-Pooh would appreciate. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Google Books can make works fully available online. This helps enable access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. 1926 was a long time ago. The vast majority of works from 1926 are out of circulation. When they enter the public domain in 2022, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.
The public domain is also a source of creativity. the purpose 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, the works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past, reinventing the books, turning them into movies, adapting the songs. and movies that’s good too! as explained in a new york times editorial:
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when a work enters the public domain, it means that the public can afford to use it freely, to give it a new validity. . . [Public domain works] are an essential part of every artist’s livelihood, every person’s livelihood. 3
just as shakespeare’s plays have given us everything from 10 things i hate about you and kiss me kate (from the taming of the shrew ) to west side story (from romeo and juliet), who knows what could inspire the works that will enter the public domain in 2022? As with Shakespeare, the ability to freely reimagine these works can stimulate a range of creativity, from the serious to the whimsical, and in doing so allows the legacies of the original artists to live on.
here’s a more detailed snapshot of just a few of the books, sound recordings, movies, and musical compositions that will be in the public domain in 2022. 4 were supposed to enter the public domain in 2002, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended the copyright term to 95 years. Now the wait is over. (To find more material from 1926, you can visit the catalogue of copyrighted entries). 5 you can click on some of the titles below to get the new public domain works.
Each piece of recorded music is covered by two separate copyrights, one on the original composition (words and music) and the second on the actual recording of the song. we previously listed pre-1923 sound recordings that entered the public domain. these are some of the compositions from 1926 that will join them.
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