On January 1, 2023, copyright protections expired for tens of thousands of works published in the year 1927, including 60,353 available online through HathiTrust. These books, films, musical scores, and more are now a part of the public domain in the United States, making them free for all Americans to copy, adapt, display, or perform. The public domain is often described as an intellectual inheritance or shared cultural wellspring—it represents those works which have stood the test of time and become a part of a people’s collective story. Notable additions this year include the silent film Metropolis, as well as the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer. Virginia Woolfe’s To The Lighthouse and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes adventures top the list of famous works of literature, along with a slew of books by luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen.
Even as we celebrate these famous pieces taking their place in the pubic domain, however, we must acknowledge that many more have become orphaned or out-of-print during the 95-year-long waiting period when they were restricted by copyright laws. As with 75% of silent films produced between 1912 and 1929, many works have become lost over time as awareness fades and extant copies dwindle. Digitizing works that were previously orphaned is an important step to keep them from being permanently lost, and their entrance into the public domain affords libraries the opportunity to proactively preserve them.
As United States copyright law is currently written, a work published in 2023 will not enter the public domain until the year 2118. Unpublished materials may be subject to copyright for far longer, as these continue to be restricted until 70 years after the death of their creator. For those who wish to ensure their works continue to be a part of the conversation during their own lifetimes and beyond, a variety of mechanisms exist to help creators give up some or all of their copyright protections. Most notably, Creative Commons allows users to create customized licenses for their works or dedicate them fully to the public domain. Another way to keep one’s content from languishing behind paywalls is to contribute it to an open-access institutional repository (IR) like ISU ReD: Research and eData, where it can be easily located through search engines and disseminated to interested scholars across the globe. Most scholarly journals allow authors to upload their preprints to IRs, further widening the impact of their work. To explore depositing your work in ISU ReD, reach out to Milner Library’s Scholarly Communication Team at isured@IllinoisState.edu.
