Michael sez, "It's January 1st! Do you know what works are passing into the public domain in the life+50, and life+70 countries? Lots!
Here in the USA (where basically nothing published in 1923 or later will ever enter the public domain, to protect Disney's 'Steamboat Willie'), only unpublished works of the life+70 class of authors enter the public domain.
Whew. Thank goodness for small favors, right?. We can now expect the unpublished works of George Gershwin, H.P. Lovecraft, Amelia Earhart, J.M. Barrie, and John Davison Rockefeller (yeah right), among many others, to be free and clear of copyright encumbrances for those who wish to publish them.
Boy, unpublished works! Wow! After 70 years since they died, there must be lots of those hanging around, right? Right?"
John Mark Ockerbloom, online librarian, sez, "For this year's Public Domain Day, I'm blogging about both what the
public domain can do for us, and what we can do for the public domain.
In particular, this is the first New Year's Day that's more than 14
years after the 1993 introduction of NCSA Mosaic, the browser that
started the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. 14 years is also
the initial term of copyright specified in the Statute of Anne and
the US's first copyright law. So in honor of that, I'm dedicating
the copyrights of the 1993 versions of my web sites, which include
the still-going-strong Online Books Page, to the public domain.
And I invite other Net old-timers to make similar dedications of
their old online content."
The life+50 class of the newly-Public Domain includes works by American novelist Anne Parrish; British novelist Dorothy Richardson; Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias; Romanian poet George Bacovia; Canadian-American geologist Reginald Aldworth Daly; American journalist, novelist, dramatist and poet Kenneth Lewis Roberts; Australian children's author Gladys Lister; American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.; Irish-British mystery author Freeman Wills Crofts; American architect Julia Morgan; Swiss-Canadian geologist Carl Faessler; Canadian historian John Bartlet Brebner; Swiss artist Adolf Dietrich; American Prohibition agent Eliot Ness; Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi; American novelist and poet Christopher Morley; Italian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; English theologian, priest, and crime writer Msgr Ronald Arbuthnott Knox; American geologist William H. Twenhofel; British lawyer and self-styled explorer Sir Randle F.W. Holme; Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral; British physician and medical historian John Joyce Keevil; American ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore; author and Esperantist James Denson Sayers; British biophysicist Rosalind Franklin; American artist Adaline Kent; British detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers (aka "Mrs Fleming"); American author Peter B. Kyne; American Western novelist Eugene Cunningham; Ukrainian-born writer Mark Aleksandrovich Aldanov; Anglo-Irish fantasy writer Lord Dunsany; Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis ("Zorba the Greek", "Last Temptation of Christ"); Irish artist Jack Butler Yeats; American explorer and aviator Richard Evelyn Byrd; American collector of Native American antiquities George Gustav Heye; British-born philatelist Bertram William Henry Poole; British architect and urban planner Sir (Leslie) Patrick Abercrombie; British journalist and author Helen Pearl Adam; Irish physician and poet Oliver St John Gogarty; Canadian geologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell; Danish artist Kay Nielsen; American journalist Burton Rascoe; Italian poet and novelist Umberto Poli ("Umberto Saba"); German film director Max Ophüls; Canadian Parliamentarian Martha Louise Black; American astronomer Mary Proctor; Finnish composer Jean Sibelius; Hungarian-American mathematician John Von Neumann; Austrian-born anthropologist Felix Bryk; English writer and poet Rose Fyleman; Austrian-American composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold; Austrian-American psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich; British "boys stories" novelist Frederick Sadleir Brereton; American political scientist and philosopher Arthur F Bentley; Australian archaeologist and historian Gordon Childe; Canadian political scientist and historian William Bennett Munro; German physicist Johannes Stark; American pulp sci-fi author Ray Cummings…
