These Copyrighted Works of 1923 Will Go Into the Public Domain in 2019

For the first time in twenty years, The Atlantic notes that a full year’s copyrighted works will go into the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019. Under the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, works first published in 1923. will go into the public domain, meaning anyone can republish them or shred them and use them in other projects without asking permission and without paying the old copyright holders. You can record new versions of music; you can show films at a profit; they can even be redone. Amazon can sell you an e-book and keep all the money, and Project Gutenberg can give you an e-book for free. The Atlantic has a short list; we have a longer one below.

You can even create new copyrighted works based on old works – the way Disney made all of its cartoons based on public domain fairy tales – and people can’t copy any new pieces that you include. (This is why anyone can make a movie about the fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but only Disney can create new things in which the dwarfs are named Grunt, Sleepy, Sneezer, Dope, Happy, Shy and Doc.)

As for Disney, it was they who lobbied for such long copyright terms, because in 1998 Mickey Mouse’s first appearance (in the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie ) was close to losing the copyright. But after the Sonny Bono Act, Mickey Mouse’s first appearance will go public in 2024. Walt Disney just started their company in 1923, but they never came out with anything serious. So we won’t have free Disney stuff in January.

But here’s what we get:

Cinema

All of these films , including:

• Cecil B. DeMille (first, lesser known, silent version) of the Ten Commandments
• Harold Lloyd’s last safety ! including the scene where he hangs from the clock tower and his ” Why Worry?”
• A long list of feature-length silent films, including Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality and Charlie Chaplin’s Pilgrim .
• Short films by Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang (later Little Rascals )
• Cartoons, including Felix the Cat (character first appeared in the 1919 cartoon)
• Film debut Marlene Dietrich, cameo in the silent German comedy Little Napoleon ; also debuts by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Faye Ray

Music

All this music , including these classics:

• “King Porter Stomp”
• “Who is sorry now?”
• Tin Roof Blues
• “My old gang”
• “Yes! We have no bananas”
• “I cried for you”
• “Charleston” – written to accompany the Charleston dance and become a big factor in its popularity.
• “Octet for Wind Instruments” by Igor Stravinsky

And I chose these songs solely by their titles:

• “Back to Croa-Jingo-Long”
• “I am sitting in a beautiful little town”
• “Come on, spark plug!”
• “Dizzy fingers”
• “I got ‘Yes’! We don’t have banana blues. “
• “When it’s night in Italy, it’s Wednesday.”
• “Oh God, God, God, I’m in love”
• “Old King Tut”
• “Horse, keep your tail up.”

Please note that these are published compilations of songs, not recordings, meaning you can record a cover version without permission or payment, but you cannot just steal any recording after 1923. So, Connie Francis’s version of “Who’s Sorry Now?” still copyrighted.

Worse, the rights to music recorded before 1972 are governed by state law, and once copyright has been registered and renewed, it doesn’t automatically go into the public domain until 2067.

Literature

This is really good shit. All these books , and these books , including the classics:

• Jean Twomer’s cane
• Prophet Khalil Gibran
• Bambi by Felix Salten, illustrated by Barbara Cooney – source for the Disney animated film and first in the series
• Ego and Id , Sigmund Freud
• Towards the new architecture of Le Corbusier
• Whose body? , first novel by Lord Peter Wimsey by Dorothy L. Sayers
• The story “Mrs. Dalloway on Bond Street »Virginia Woolf
• Emily from New Moon , the first book of the Emily L. M. Montgomery trilogy
• Unique Jeeves and leave it to Psmith P.G. Wodehouse
• Agatha Christie’s two novels by Hercule Poirot, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder in References
• The Prisoner , Volume 5 of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (note that English translations have their own copyright)
• Complete Works of Anthony Trollope
• ” Saint Jeanne” by George Bernard Shaw
• Tales by Christie, Virginia Woolf, Lovecraft, Katherine Mansfield and Ernest Hemingway
• Poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Sukumar Ray and Pablo Neruda
• Works by Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jean Cocteau, Italo Svevo, Aldous Huxley, Winston Churchill, G.K. Chesterton, Maria Montessori, Lu Xin, Joseph Conrad, Zane Gray, H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs

Art

These works of art , including:

• Bird of Constantin Brancusi in space
• Odalisque by Henri Matisse with raised hands
• The Bride Naked Even by the Bachelors of Marcel Duchamp (Big Glass)
• Metempsychosis of Yokoyama Taikan
• The works of M.S. Escher, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst and Man Ray

Many works from 1923, such as the blockbuster The Hunchback of Notre Dame , are already in the public domain because the owners have not updated their copyrights. Until 1963, the copyright holder had to manually renew their copyright after 28 years.

According to the LibraryLaw blog, not everything that was published in 1923 will go into the public domain; only works with the authorized 1923 edition . This distinction arose in a lawsuit over the rights to “Happy Birthday to You,” where the current owners claimed the song was only released from unauthorized sources, without permission from the original owners. (The bad song ended up in the public domain for other reasons.) So if you’re worried about controversial copyright holders, make sure the 1923 publication isn’t considered a stolen unauthorized version.

Please be aware that the above works will only lose their copyright on January 1, 2019. Check again before using any of the above, and note all the many ways in which works may or may not enter the public domain. Remember that certain uses of works protected by copyright, are protected as fair use . And check out the many existing collections of works, no longer have rights , as well as works , copyright in the public domain .

Bugfix 7/1/18: Corrected which work by Virginia Woolf was first published in 1923.

A landslide of classical art is about to enter the public domain | Atlantic Ocean

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