Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
A new year has arrived and, with it, a new crop of literature, music, films and other media has entered the public domain. “That means the copyright has expired,” explains Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, to the NPR. “And all works are free for anyone to use, reuse and build for anyone – without paying a fee.” In other words, starting today, the seminal works of 1925 are at your disposal, to maintain and adapt them in an anachronistic musical or prestige horror drama full of zombies.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The big Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Earnest Hemingway’s In Our Timand, Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith, Aldous Huxley’s Those sterile sheets, Agatha Christie’s The secret of the chimneysand The new black, edited by Alain Locke and featuring works by authors like Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston and others, are just some of the volumes now in the public domain.
As for the films, Buster Keaton’s Go West, Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, The cheerful widowand Quarantined lovers also arrived, while songs like “Always” by Irving Berlin, “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson and “Shave ‘Em Dry” by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey can be added immediately to the soundtrack to your film .
You can view the list of works curated by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain or spend the next twelve months or more examining the complete list, which includes pamphlets, leaflets, periodicals, maps, lectures and sermons. Why does Hollywood love an existing IP, and why shouldn’t that IP be a 1925 pamphlet?