Public Domain Day


Public Domain Day is an observance of when copyrights expire and works enter into the public domain. This legal transition of copyright works into the public domain usually happens every year on 1 January based on the individual copyright laws of each country.
The observance of a "Public Domain Day" was initially informal; the earliest known mention was in 2004 by Wallace McLean, with support for the idea echoed by Lawrence Lessig. Several websites list the authors whose works are entering the public domain each January 1. There are activities in countries around the world by various organizations all under the banner Public Domain Day.

Public domain

Copyright protection terms are typically described as the life of the author plus a certain number of years after his or her death. In many jurisdictions, this usually means that 70 years have passed since the day of author's death. After that period, the works of those authors become fully available so that everyone—without any need for prior authorization—can access and use them for any purpose whatsoever. Legally, this happens on New Year's Day. That means that in those countries, the works of authors who died, anywhere in the world, throughout the year of, passed into public domain on 1 January.
Since public domain rights vary based on jurisdiction, the passage of a work into the public domain is not worldwide. The most noticeable exception is the United States, where no additional published works entered the public domain automatically from 1999 to 2018. Australia copyright scheme is even more restrictive, with no Public Domain Day possible until 2026. Most of Europe will witness various works passing into the public domain, as will Canada and New Zealand. Many more works would be entering the public domain if not for the copyright extension that has occurred several times in the past several decades.
Public Domain Day in 2010 celebrated the entry to the public domain in many countries of the works of authors such as Sigmund Freud, William Butler Yeats, Ford Madox Ford and Arthur Rackham. In 2011, it celebrated the public domain status of Isaac Babel, Walter Benjamin, John Buchan, Mikhail Bulgakov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Emma Goldman, Paul Klee, Selma Lagerlöf, Leon Trotsky, Vito Volterra, Nathanael West, and others.

Celebrations

It is not clear when Public Domain Day started to be observed but in recent years it has been mentioned by Project Gutenberg and has been promoted by Creative Commons. Public Domain Day events have been hosted on various dates in Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Israel.
In January 2011, to celebrate Public Domain Day 2011, Open Knowledge Foundation launched The Public Domain Review, a web-based review of works which have entered the public domain.
In January 2012, a celebration was announced in Warsaw, Poland and for the first time in Kraków), where for several years on that day various activities have been organized by free culture NGOs and other supporters. Other 2012 events announced worldwide:
In later years, Public Domain Day events have been organized by Communia, which also maintained the publicdomainday.org website.

2019

Public Domain Day in 2019 was significant in the United States as it was the first to have any meaningful copyright expirations there since the holiday's establishment; a 20-year freeze had been imposed in 1998 with the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Several activities were carried to celebrate the event, including a special section at the MIT Libraries for public domain works and the "Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain" that took place at the Internet Archive with the presence of members of Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation, among other scholars like Pam Samuelson, Lawrence Lessig and James Boyle.