The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living.
I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.
I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?
I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
> Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
Using your example and the rules suggested in the grandparent post, GRRM's copyright would have been set to initially expire in 2024, where he would be able to pay $100k to renew it until 2038. Handmaiden's Tale works in a similar way, with the initial expiration in 2013.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
I like Cory Doctorow's analogy: Artists are, to a large degree, at the mercy of big companies (publishers, music labels, etc), who have the leverage to force artists to sign over all of their rights. Giving artists more rights is like giving your kid more lunch money when it's being stolen by a bully: no matter how much money you give your kid in that situation it's not going to give him any lunch.
So add another 14 to the original 14+14, giving 42 years of maximum protection. That would cover your examples and require active renewal to send abandonware to the public domain earlier. I'd love to see shorter terms, but active renewal would already greatly enrich the public domain.
If a novel you wrote 15 years ago becomes hugely successful you can capitalize with a sequel. Maybe GRRM would have written them a little faster in that universe.
For a novel of middling success, like Game of Thrones ca 2004, as is the argument here? Why would anyone write and publish that sequel? Nobody would buy it if it was not from the original author.
Just in case you're actually unaware, the Organization for Transformative Works https://archiveofourown.org/ Archive Of Our Own (typically shortened to AO3) is where a tremendous amount of such fiction is archived.
This is not an endorsement of the work, but there's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I hear 50 Shades of Gray is another fanfic that went mainstream.
A book nerd could come up with a much longer list, but I know there's a ton more illegal unlicensed! Harry Potter fan fic.
as much as I think the copyright 14 years thing is one of the more contemptible ideas well to do programmers have on how to improve things by making things worse for people who make less money, I don't think copyright is longer than 14 years is the only reason works by the original author of a series earns more money than fan fiction.
It is. A common argument against using "intellectual property" is how beliefs about tangible property - land and objects - shouldn't be applied to copyright, patent, etc., so using the term is an implicit acceptance of a false narrative.
My assertion is much weaker and therefore much easier to defend — even if you agree with copyright, patents, trademarks, and so on, it is not to out advantage as individuals to support grouping them into one umbrella term as it muddies the waters.
Trademark and service marks are a whole different ball game from copyright. To group them together confuses everyone and is therefore only beneficial for those who wish to fish in troubled waters.
Law is all about enforced opinion on what others should say and do.
Even property is a misnomer on that regard. The proper of someone is certainly more spontaneously matchable with one corpse. If anything, a land encompasses people, and someone psychological traits are indeed more property of the person but they can make it lasts through some expression of it only in external support which are distinct from their proper self.
The opinion that it is real is also not a fact. We're not talking about physical things. They're made up rules about made up things. It can all be different if we agree to make it so.
IP isn't a concept that has existed in all cultures for all time. It's not inherent to group dynamics or humanity. It's not even a concept that's fully respected by cultures that claim to care about it.
I'd push even further and say it encroaches, if not outright invades the conversation about who owns what data. Both are terribly muddy waters, to be sure, but something worth hashing out since we live in an age of information that is both accessible and under threat, so the real question is where do we want to collectively steer this ship?
"Quite often" = actually quite rare. I think you greatly underestimate the number of new novels published each year.
Your first two examples would have been covered under a 14+14 copyright period.
I do not think a 28-year copyright period would have kept Atwood from writing The Handmaiden's Tale, do you? She was a millionaire by the time that copyright expired.
I don't think looking at peak sales for outlying cases should affect copyright limits. When were peak sales for Shakespeare's Hamlet? Darwin's On the Origin of Species? Marx's Das Kapital?
The justification for US copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The problem you point out is that right can be transferred to publishers and others. Note that since 1978 it's possible for an author to terminate that transfer after 35 years, which is well after those peaks you mentioned.
What you've not mentioned is the ability for other authors to build on existing ideas. Disney famously profited by re-telling public domain stories, but will come down on you if you re-tell their stories. Speaking of fantasy, you can now write stories which take place in Oz, but make sure it doesn't have ruby slippers as that's a detail from the movie, which is still under copyright.
> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity
Yes - the catalyst was the amazing (early on) TV series, and not the book.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
In the case of GoT, if the TV series had never happened then the popularity wouldn't have happened. The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
Yes, there was some stuff done that sold some books, and some more stuff done (under licence from the author) that sold waaaaaay more books (that goes to the author) and generates cash.
What's the problem, I suppose? The author definitely did better out of the TV production than vice versa.
I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world he would take it good and proper.
Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously.
finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.
It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain a reasonable number of years after that sale.
Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be extended after the fact for already being profitable? That only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright already does, to the detriment of everyone else.
It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for people), and would love to return it to something like 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind not doing that is massive, and I think most of the population have been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that there will never be populist support for it.
But there might be populist support for releasing old stuff that nobody's using. More people would agree, for instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but those who think they might own some part of it threaten to sue).
And who knows, once people get used to the idea that copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more amenable to the idea that they should be something more reasonable.
I don't think the problem is most people being against shorter copyright terms but simply them not caring. I don't think a compromise with the devil will change anything about that.
I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al.
The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits.
Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.
So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each.
Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.
Did you mean to reply to someone else? I agreed with Disney paying more. My issue is with small time authors being unable to afford the fee and people wanting to license the content just waiting out each 14 year term out to see if the author will renew instead of simply licensing it. The example I gave is the Lord of the Rings.
The proposed system doesn’t affect Disney that much, but it will negatively affect small timers.
Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.
Citizens united maybe? when corporations have liability they’re a group and no one is responsible. when they want to assert rights and make $ “they’re an individual” it’s complete corruption
Why not just consume public-domain IP to begin with? The "Classics" of Western literature used to be viewed as the necessary foundation of a proper education in the humanities; and today you could add "classic" works from other literary traditions (India, China, etc.) for an even more well-rounded approach.
Classics absolutely matter and we should read more of them, but relying only on public domain works ignores how cultural participation is driven by shared contemporary moments. The ever-changing stream of new content is critical for our social experience.
It's also it's necessary that we have culture that is recognisable in our own lives. Pride and Prejudice is a great book, but it's arguably more alien than Star Trek.
At some point I looked into it, and if the laws were what they are today, Disney wouldn't have been able to make Alice in Wonderland (1951) without paying Lewis Carroll's (d. 1898) estate until 1968. The Little Mermaid (1989) was safe though, since Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875 (so his copyright would have expired in 1950).
Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) has only recently entered the public domain for life+50 countries due to JRR Tolkien dying in 1973, despite the work being over 70 years old. It won't enter the public domain in life+70 countries until 2044.
Only recently are works written in the early to mid 1900s being released in the public domain. This limits the works to around the first world war. For example:
- HG Wells (Died 1946, Life+70 in 2017), works like War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
- LM Montgomery (Died 1942, Life+70 in 2013), works like Anne of Green Gables -- In the US where publication + 90 years is in effect, her later works (after ~1925) are not yet in the public domain there.
With comic IPs, most are not yet in the public domain:
- Superman (1938, P+95 of 2034) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
- Batman (1939, P+95 of 2035) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
So the current copyright terms are very limiting for IPs that are nearly a decade old.
I used to be a patient video gamer, waiting for games to go on deep discount before buying them. Somehow it never occurred to me that I was missing out on the experiencing with everyone else at launch. I bought one game at launch and it was an absolute blast. We’re social animals, so of course sharing a new experience with others makes it more fun. I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand.
Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff that's been translated in the past few decades and those aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
> even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
And yet, people used to read those older translations just fine. It's just a matter of literary style, it doesn't really impact the understanding of the text.
My friends and I have been doing a book club like this online for years, where we only read books in the public domain. It’s been an amazing experience and I think we look forward to it each week. https://b00k.club
It allows you the freedom to publish works in those worlds, reference characters, etc. See for example the horror game Alice: Madness Returns based on the Alice in Wonderland series.
What about making people profit and enjoy life without having to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to make them worth having them alive?
The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one.
Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that.
The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions.
If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter, because it would reduce the risk of entrenching the differences or giving too much power to a few.
I find more important what is the society's perceived "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy / depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless and starving.
In other countries "success" can be considered also about "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...
>If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter
There no need to be exclusive, and actually having concentration of wealth in a few hands is already a social construct. A society can also thrive without high income disparities. Taxing the rich is just taxing on what was captured from the non-rich.
This is a good point, but a lot of ressources have a fixed or limited supply (arguably all of them); if wealth inequality increases, the poor fraction of the population will have a harder time competing for those.
Consider urban housing as an example (specifically price development in terms of median income, and how the supply side reacts to wealth distribution by "overdelivering" luxury appartments from the average citizens point of view).
Increasing inequality is also problematic because it fosters rent-seeking behavior which is self-reinforcing (because this siphons income from the poor side of your distribution to the wealthy one).
It might well be better to be less wealthy in a society with lower spread.
You could also argue that most wealth right now is accumulated/grown by "extracting" a bit of the value from the work of others. Consider Valve (the game distribution platform) for a very obvious example: They make something around $50M per employee in revenue. Are their employees working ten times harder than average game developers (by literally any reasonable metric)? I'd argue that their company became very good at extracting value from the whole market, instead. Absurd wealth does not come from doing lots of work yourself, it comes from taking a little bit from lots of people.
It's absolutely ridiculous and has almost everything to do with Disney trying to maintain their hold on Mickey Mouse. Every single time his expiration came up they managed to lobby for an extension and now we're left with this current mess of a system
Neat! I just discovered that Carolyn Keene's first Nancy Drew story, "The Secret of the Old Clock", will be in the public domain next year. I remember reading this in elementary school when I was on a big mystery kick for a while (I had some of the computer games, too). I had no idea it was that old.
One could even combine How to Win Friends and Influence People, the Diary of Anne Frank, the works of Einstein and Adolf Hitler into a some strange gory anime and others could do nothing about that. The possibilities are endless.
"and others could do nothing about that. The possibilities are endless."
Well, I wouldn't be so sure about it. Just because other people have no more copyright legal angle, there are still other legal and plenty of non legal ways to bother you, if you manage to piss enough people off.
I prepared three of the works listed here for Standard Ebooks, and I’m not in the US so I’m definitely not covered by US copyright law on my own machine.
“Copying” here refers to distribution and derivation, at least in the US. It is entirely legal to create copies of media for personal usage for instance (so long as you aren’t circumventing DRM, thanks DMCA).
Standard Ebooks is organized as a “low-profit L.L.C.,” or “L3C,” a kind of legal entity that blends the charitable focus of a traditional not-for-profit with the ease of organization and maintenance of a regular L.L.C.
corporations cannot make "personal copies" of copyrighted works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of microsoft office
> corporations cannot make "personal copies" of copyrighted works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of microsoft office
That would surely be a license violation, not a copyright violation?
They absolutely can (and do) make copies of the Microsoft office binary and shuttle it around their network/backups/etc, activating licenses only when they need to assign a copy to a particular user
This isn't correct. It is infringement, for example, to write Harry Potter fan fiction in private on a typewriter, even if another soul never sees it. Copyright includes creation, not just distribution
What you describe would almost certainly be considered fair use until point of distribution - it’s non commercial, transformative and has no meaningful impact on the market value of Harry Potter.
Copies for private use are going to be similar, and while I’m not a lawyer it feels like it’d be a hard case to make that work being conducted in private is going to have a meaningful impact on the market for Nancy Drew novels in the next 30 days.
If you think about it, writing “Harry Potter” on the internet could be infringement because those words might be in the book, and most worrisomely you are inducing people to make “copies” of the books in their minds. There’s no way to calculate what you owe Rowling from this post, it could be infinite.
(Thankfully I’ve never read those books so I can say the name without infringing)
Interesting case in point is Argentina. The Falklands War happened in 1982, so well within some people's lifetimes. I learnt a few years ago that photographs and writings from Argentina from 1982 are already out of copyright. Photographs from the UK are not, and won't be until seventy years after the deaths of the people who took them. So total contrast between the two jurisdictions and reflected in publications about the conflict.
In the former Soviet Union, pre-1973 material is out of copyright. Again within living memory. I don't know what Russia etc have done with copyright since then.
Keep in mind in Argentina public domain works are not free (free as beer) of use, you have to pay a fee to the government, for example if you play Beethoven music in your short film or any work you created.
This is likely going to change since the organism responsible for collecting the fees is undergoing a big restructuring.
Yeah they've done a lobbying campaign about a dozen times when Mickey was set to enter public domain. I think GP was saying they're surprised they didn't do a 13th time. Like why give up now?
The last (general) copyright extension in the US was the CTEA in 1998. What’s happened since then? Google, who has power, money, and incentive to lobby against future copyright extensions.
Because in reality it hasn't entered public domain completely, only the very first movies and the way it was drawn in the 1930's. They are still protecting the one most people all know better.
The funny thing is that Mickey Mouse barely registers for kids these days. We went to Disney World this year and Mickey had a bit part in some of the shows. Elsa, Moana and the other modern characters were the real stars.
Not exactly true, they have hacked the end of the copyright for SteamBoat Willie, by adding a few second extract of it, as part of the actual "Walt Disney Animation Studios" actual logo.
They cannot sue anymore for copyright infringements, but they may do it the registered trademark way, by saying "It's in our logo !".
Sure, the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and even Internet-accessible in some form but simply languishing in obscurity and have yet to be made comprehensively accessible to the general public (via digitizing, transcribing, indexing and comprehensive classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude larger! There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's effectively free for the taking, should anyone be interested enough to put in the work; consider the huge amount of serialized publications that might have been issued throughout the 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be essentially unknown.
Not sure why the amount of works in the public domain has any relevance to how long copyright protection is. Seems to me like they're two orthogonal issues.
Because every-time this comes up it is the same Mickey mouse complaints over and over. If you're young and your read this the first time I'm sure you're outraged.
Meanwhile there are 1000's of works that people are free to take. Better yet, there are 1000's of works that will be destroyed and not preserved that are open that should be preserved and used.
That because there's a large corpus of public domain works, then the long copyright protection is ok? That people want a short copyright protection because they're done with everything in the public domain?
Would that also imply that if the number of public domain works gets large enough, then the duration copyright protections should also increase?
Long copyright protection is not okay, but letting the huge corpus of existing public domain works languish in obscurity is not okay either; that does a lot more damage to our shared culture, and in a way that's even quite easy to address. But the damage done by keeping works in copyright is easier to see than the damage done by not making remarkably similar works accessible at all.
Run the following prompt through your favorite LLM:
"Does the following comment make logical sense:
<insert OP comment above>"
The model will agree the argument is valid, logical and coherent (chatgpt, claude and gemini 3 pro all agreed).
THEN
run this prompt:
"let's not be too hasty here.
we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically connected. As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the public domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern larger (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?"
As others have noted copyright duration is ridiculous. But more importantly it lacks severe counter-forces to balance out the explicit monopoly.
Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the protection of copyright.
If X is kept for sale for the sake of keeping copyright alive but it's not really selling much that should also affect the nature of the copyright. For example, a minimum fee you have to pay annually to keep copyright going would cull out the works that are no longer commercially viable.
The fee could be proportional to the overall sales of the works so that if your works were a huge hit in the 80's but sales have trickled down to a minimum you'd have to pay more (from the profits you've obviously received over time) to keep it copyrighted (which would force you to balance your copyrights to your net income from current sales), but if you published an obscure album decades ago that never got much traction your fees would be negligible (but you'd still have a minimum fee you'd have to pay regardless) so you would be incentivized to give up the "protection" and make it cheaper for everyone to let it fall in public domain.
Further, the various aspects of copyright could be torn down in different timeframes. Let's say you wrote a successful book in 1963 which made money but no longer sells much. You probably wouldn't mind letting the copies of the book fall in public domain but if you could keep the option to hold onto copyright for derivative works in case someone wants to make a film out of the book you could do that (again, with annual fees, but these could be lower if the original book could be freely copied).
Or some other scheme. I could soon think of dozens if I wanted to but you get the idea. How about a tax on the sales of copyrighted works that starts from 0% but increases by some percentage point each year. You can profit first but as years go by you will have to start paying more and more to keep it going as the overall balance approaches unprofitability.
Copyright doesn't have to be a complete monopoly, it could have shades of gray. Sure there are exemptions already (such as fair use, in some countries, or right to make backups under certain conditions) but none of them address the commercial stronghold copyright allows for companies to keep works of art hostage for decades and eventually, for centuries.
I just noticed the site contains a very misleading description of what a Community Interest Company is. They are not necessarily not for profits (a certain proportion of profits has to be used for the stated purpose) and they are not as tightly regulated as charities (they do not get the tax breaks charities do either) .
That is not to say this particular company is a bad thing (I have not problem with people getting reasonable remuneration) but if you want to know (e.g. if you are considering donating) its something you need to find out on a case by case basis.
This is not well known in the UK, let along outside the UK.
This article seems to imply that when works enter into the public domain depend on where they were published. This is not true! It's based on where you are and when it was published.I E, if you're in the USA and some work published in a death+50 year country is in the public domain in said country, it would still be illegal to distribute in the US.
Similarly, some works that are published in the US but are not in the public domain there could be perfectly legal to publish in a death+50 year country.
The entire page is underwhelming. For someone in the US, I walked away with basically no new information other than some stuff will enter public domain at new years.
> In our advent-style calendar below, find our top pick of what lies in store for 2026. Each day, as we move through December, we’ll open a new window to reveal our highlights! By public domain day on January 1st they will all be unveiled — look out for a special blogpost from us on that day. (And, of course, if you want to dive straight in and explore the vast swathe of new entrants for yourself, just visit the links above).
No software in the list, duration of copyright for software is not adapted to the specifics of the field, no hardware would exist anymore to make this kind of software useful. Pure waste.
Swallows and Amazons is on the list? My favorite book; when I was a kid I read Czech translation published in 1930s, so I shouldn't be that surprised it's entering public domain.
in my old neighbourhood, there was a couple where the husband creatd the intro-jingle for one of the major local news shows.
they are playing his jingle for more than 20 years now.
he became so wealhty that he could afford to tear down his old house, move temporaly to a hotel with the whole family, while the new villa was built on the old ground.
This always blows my mind about the US - the fact that individual cities and states are large enough markets people can become enormously wealthy catering to their locality. A staggering difference from Europe.
This article and the articles linked in it only provide a selection of works entering public domain in 2026. Does anyone know of a database or list of works so that I can see all of them? Other than the Wikipedia article that only has a list of names.
For Hitler, the rights to the original text of Mein Kampf (and probably many of his other writings) went to Bavaria after he died.
However various translations and abridgements were made with their own copyright.
Houghton Mifflin owns the rights to the US version of Mein Kampf, which was published in the 30s with a lot of the Hitler-iest parts removed (the rights are separate from the British version even though the text is identical). During WW2 and even up until the 1970s, the US government confiscated the royalties that were owed to Hitler.
Houghton Mifflin was eventually able to purchase the full rights. After an article in 2000 about how profitable it was, they started donating the profits to Holocaust-related charities. A few years ago they decided to go back to pocketing the money.
I’m adding a one-act Tanizaki play to Standard Ebooks’ Tanizaki collection[1] on the 1st January. Some Akutagawa shorts go into US public domain next year too. (Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.)
> Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.
It’s based on both. For example, a translation or other derivative work whose copyright expired “early” in the US due to non‐renewal would still be encumbered by the copyright of the original. That’s basically what happened to It’s a Wonderful Life—the film is technically in the public domain, but is still held in Paramount’s iron grip by way of the renewed copyright of the original short story.
Note that the copyright is not about the source country of the work, but where do make/distribute the copy. Do you live in Japan, or are you interested in Japanese works? (Or both, possibly.)
The "TPP11," which includes a provision to extend the term of protection to 70 years, will enter into force on December 30, 2018.
In Japan, the term of copyright protection will, in principle, be 70 years after the death of the author (or 70 years after publication for works published anonymously, under a pseudonym, or in the name of a corporate body).
Copyrights that have already expired at the time of enforcement will not be revived (principle of non-retroactivity of protection).
Consequently, no works will newly enter the public domain for the next 20 years.
Worth noting that Canada is in the same boat since 2022. Australia has only recently seen authors enter the public domain again, since the change there was made in 2004.
The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living.
I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.
I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?
So many ideas better than the current regime.
I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
> Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
Using your example and the rules suggested in the grandparent post, GRRM's copyright would have been set to initially expire in 2024, where he would be able to pay $100k to renew it until 2038. Handmaiden's Tale works in a similar way, with the initial expiration in 2013.
This still seems very reasonable to me.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
I like Cory Doctorow's analogy: Artists are, to a large degree, at the mercy of big companies (publishers, music labels, etc), who have the leverage to force artists to sign over all of their rights. Giving artists more rights is like giving your kid more lunch money when it's being stolen by a bully: no matter how much money you give your kid in that situation it's not going to give him any lunch.
So add another 14 to the original 14+14, giving 42 years of maximum protection. That would cover your examples and require active renewal to send abandonware to the public domain earlier. I'd love to see shorter terms, but active renewal would already greatly enrich the public domain.
If a novel you wrote 15 years ago becomes hugely successful you can capitalize with a sequel. Maybe GRRM would have written them a little faster in that universe.
Or you can't because 57 new sequels were published the week before.
For a novel of middling success, like Game of Thrones ca 2004, as is the argument here? Why would anyone write and publish that sequel? Nobody would buy it if it was not from the original author.
Have you noticed how the abundance of fan fictions have completely killed famous book series? Me neither.
No, but I think it might happen if copyright lapsed in 14 years.
What fan fiction?
Just in case you're actually unaware, the Organization for Transformative Works https://archiveofourown.org/ Archive Of Our Own (typically shortened to AO3) is where a tremendous amount of such fiction is archived.
So where can a mainstream consumer purchase or borrow a paperback edition of those stories?
I mean https://www.printingcenterusa.com/printing/book-printing
This is not an endorsement of the work, but there's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I hear 50 Shades of Gray is another fanfic that went mainstream.
A book nerd could come up with a much longer list, but I know there's a ton more illegal unlicensed! Harry Potter fan fic.
exactly.
Because copyright lasts longer than 14 years.
as much as I think the copyright 14 years thing is one of the more contemptible ideas well to do programmers have on how to improve things by making things worse for people who make less money, I don't think copyright is longer than 14 years is the only reason works by the original author of a series earns more money than fan fiction.
>IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
Im pretty sure that was always the sales pitch and never the intent.
Similar to the Patriot act.
14 years is already too long.
Also, IP is not real. It is a term we should avoid. Copyright and trademark have nothing to do with each other.
IP is just the umbrella term for copyright/design/trademark/patent, isn't it?
It is. A common argument against using "intellectual property" is how beliefs about tangible property - land and objects - shouldn't be applied to copyright, patent, etc., so using the term is an implicit acceptance of a false narrative.
My assertion is much weaker and therefore much easier to defend — even if you agree with copyright, patents, trademarks, and so on, it is not to out advantage as individuals to support grouping them into one umbrella term as it muddies the waters.
Trademark and service marks are a whole different ball game from copyright. To group them together confuses everyone and is therefore only beneficial for those who wish to fish in troubled waters.
Property isn’t real either.
> IP is not real. It is a term we should avoid.
Your opinion does not make that fact.
Law is all about enforced opinion on what others should say and do.
Even property is a misnomer on that regard. The proper of someone is certainly more spontaneously matchable with one corpse. If anything, a land encompasses people, and someone psychological traits are indeed more property of the person but they can make it lasts through some expression of it only in external support which are distinct from their proper self.
The opinion that it is real is also not a fact. We're not talking about physical things. They're made up rules about made up things. It can all be different if we agree to make it so.
IP isn't a concept that has existed in all cultures for all time. It's not inherent to group dynamics or humanity. It's not even a concept that's fully respected by cultures that claim to care about it.
I'd push even further and say it encroaches, if not outright invades the conversation about who owns what data. Both are terribly muddy waters, to be sure, but something worth hashing out since we live in an age of information that is both accessible and under threat, so the real question is where do we want to collectively steer this ship?
"Quite often" = actually quite rare. I think you greatly underestimate the number of new novels published each year.
Your first two examples would have been covered under a 14+14 copyright period.
I do not think a 28-year copyright period would have kept Atwood from writing The Handmaiden's Tale, do you? She was a millionaire by the time that copyright expired.
I don't think looking at peak sales for outlying cases should affect copyright limits. When were peak sales for Shakespeare's Hamlet? Darwin's On the Origin of Species? Marx's Das Kapital?
The justification for US copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The problem you point out is that right can be transferred to publishers and others. Note that since 1978 it's possible for an author to terminate that transfer after 35 years, which is well after those peaks you mentioned.
What you've not mentioned is the ability for other authors to build on existing ideas. Disney famously profited by re-telling public domain stories, but will come down on you if you re-tell their stories. Speaking of fantasy, you can now write stories which take place in Oz, but make sure it doesn't have ruby slippers as that's a detail from the movie, which is still under copyright.
> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity
Yes - the catalyst was the amazing (early on) TV series, and not the book.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
In the case of GoT, if the TV series had never happened then the popularity wouldn't have happened. The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
> The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
The author’s book got popular based on the efforts of others based on the author’s book.
That's true of course, but the book series wouldn't have become a cultural phenomenon that makes billions.
Unlike, for probably the only example, Harry Potter, which was already a cultural phenomenon when the first film was announced.
Yes, there was some stuff done that sold some books, and some more stuff done (under licence from the author) that sold waaaaaay more books (that goes to the author) and generates cash.
What's the problem, I suppose? The author definitely did better out of the TV production than vice versa.
> The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
LMAO the serie would not even exists if not of his books
I'm not saying it would. Sorry to spoil the laughter.
Nah it was popular among people who read books long before the tv show.
I read it too before the series came out, but it wasn't the same level of popularity.
I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world he would take it good and proper.
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-pete...
Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously.
finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.
It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain a reasonable number of years after that sale.
Which key pieces of IP are worth the exponential fees?
Something like Harry Potter must be worth more than $100M for 14 years, for example.
Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be extended after the fact for already being profitable? That only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright already does, to the detriment of everyone else.
It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for people), and would love to return it to something like 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind not doing that is massive, and I think most of the population have been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that there will never be populist support for it.
But there might be populist support for releasing old stuff that nobody's using. More people would agree, for instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but those who think they might own some part of it threaten to sue).
And who knows, once people get used to the idea that copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more amenable to the idea that they should be something more reasonable.
I don't think the problem is most people being against shorter copyright terms but simply them not caring. I don't think a compromise with the devil will change anything about that.
Corporations will just turn things into trademarks, like Disney did with Mickey Mouse.
Good luck with that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Enhancement_Act
I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al.
The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits.
Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.
So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each.
Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.
The idea of an exponential fee is a good one, in what universe does a _single_ Disney IP become worth over $1T?
Did you mean to reply to someone else? I agreed with Disney paying more. My issue is with small time authors being unable to afford the fee and people wanting to license the content just waiting out each 14 year term out to see if the author will renew instead of simply licensing it. The example I gave is the Lord of the Rings.
The proposed system doesn’t affect Disney that much, but it will negatively affect small timers.
Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.
Citizens united maybe? when corporations have liability they’re a group and no one is responsible. when they want to assert rights and make $ “they’re an individual” it’s complete corruption
Why not just consume public-domain IP to begin with? The "Classics" of Western literature used to be viewed as the necessary foundation of a proper education in the humanities; and today you could add "classic" works from other literary traditions (India, China, etc.) for an even more well-rounded approach.
Classics absolutely matter and we should read more of them, but relying only on public domain works ignores how cultural participation is driven by shared contemporary moments. The ever-changing stream of new content is critical for our social experience.
It's also it's necessary that we have culture that is recognisable in our own lives. Pride and Prejudice is a great book, but it's arguably more alien than Star Trek.
When the "classics" were decided to be "the classics" (by who? why? on what authority?) a lot of them were newer than Mickey Mouse is today.
At some point I looked into it, and if the laws were what they are today, Disney wouldn't have been able to make Alice in Wonderland (1951) without paying Lewis Carroll's (d. 1898) estate until 1968. The Little Mermaid (1989) was safe though, since Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875 (so his copyright would have expired in 1950).
Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) has only recently entered the public domain for life+50 countries due to JRR Tolkien dying in 1973, despite the work being over 70 years old. It won't enter the public domain in life+70 countries until 2044.
Only recently are works written in the early to mid 1900s being released in the public domain. This limits the works to around the first world war. For example:
- HG Wells (Died 1946, Life+70 in 2017), works like War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
- LM Montgomery (Died 1942, Life+70 in 2013), works like Anne of Green Gables -- In the US where publication + 90 years is in effect, her later works (after ~1925) are not yet in the public domain there.
With comic IPs, most are not yet in the public domain:
- Superman (1938, P+95 of 2034) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
- Batman (1939, P+95 of 2035) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
So the current copyright terms are very limiting for IPs that are nearly a decade old.
While your end goal is admirable, it’s more fun to share new experiences with others.
Also, there’s a lot of really good albums from the past 70 years you’d be missing out on.
I used to be a patient video gamer, waiting for games to go on deep discount before buying them. Somehow it never occurred to me that I was missing out on the experiencing with everyone else at launch. I bought one game at launch and it was an absolute blast. We’re social animals, so of course sharing a new experience with others makes it more fun. I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand.
"I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand."
Maybe you should have enjoyed more xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/606/
Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff that's been translated in the past few decades and those aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
> even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
And yet, people used to read those older translations just fine. It's just a matter of literary style, it doesn't really impact the understanding of the text.
My friends and I have been doing a book club like this online for years, where we only read books in the public domain. It’s been an amazing experience and I think we look forward to it each week. https://b00k.club
> Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood.
Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?
(I do think copyright times are too long, but I do wonder what a "good timescale" would be, and what the benefits and arguments would be.)
It allows you the freedom to publish works in those worlds, reference characters, etc. See for example the horror game Alice: Madness Returns based on the Alice in Wonderland series.
> Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?
This kind of baby and bathwater argument could as well be used to ban writing altogether!
Shorter copyrights would lead to less beatings of dead tauntauns or thestrals.
What about making people profit and enjoy life without having to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to make them worth having them alive?
The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one.
Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that.
The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/77/4/1128/8172634?login...
If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter, because it would reduce the risk of entrenching the differences or giving too much power to a few.
I find more important what is the society's perceived "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy / depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless and starving.
In other countries "success" can be considered also about "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...
>If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter
There no need to be exclusive, and actually having concentration of wealth in a few hands is already a social construct. A society can also thrive without high income disparities. Taxing the rich is just taxing on what was captured from the non-rich.
>captured from the non-rich.
What do you mean by this? The economy is not zero sum, it is possible for everyone to get "wealthier", even if the spread increases.
This is a good point, but a lot of ressources have a fixed or limited supply (arguably all of them); if wealth inequality increases, the poor fraction of the population will have a harder time competing for those.
Consider urban housing as an example (specifically price development in terms of median income, and how the supply side reacts to wealth distribution by "overdelivering" luxury appartments from the average citizens point of view).
Increasing inequality is also problematic because it fosters rent-seeking behavior which is self-reinforcing (because this siphons income from the poor side of your distribution to the wealthy one).
It might well be better to be less wealthy in a society with lower spread.
You could also argue that most wealth right now is accumulated/grown by "extracting" a bit of the value from the work of others. Consider Valve (the game distribution platform) for a very obvious example: They make something around $50M per employee in revenue. Are their employees working ten times harder than average game developers (by literally any reasonable metric)? I'd argue that their company became very good at extracting value from the whole market, instead. Absurd wealth does not come from doing lots of work yourself, it comes from taking a little bit from lots of people.
We could call it "intellectual feudalism" though academia is competing for that name also.
True, but wouldn't a sliding scale based on commercial success make more sense? How would you measure "worth it" for smaller creators?
Why? If something is wildly popular then there are even more fans who deserve to own their childhood.
"Worth it" would mean someone is willing to pay huge fees for the extension. An exponential scale ensures that nobody can afford it for long.
We'll be celebrating this at the Internet Archive! As a lead-up, we're again hosting our Public Domain Film Remix Contest: https://blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/2026-public-domain-day-r...
We'll be having an in-person celebration at our SF HQ later in January as well, details to come!
To avoid the advent calendar, this may be more useful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_in_public_domain
What really sends home just how ridiculously long it takes public domain to kick in to me is that Mein Kampf is on that list.
It feels like something that even in 1996 would have been a bit eye-raisingly overdue.
It's absolutely ridiculous and has almost everything to do with Disney trying to maintain their hold on Mickey Mouse. Every single time his expiration came up they managed to lobby for an extension and now we're left with this current mess of a system
Wow, I didn't know the connections between Mickey Mouse and Mein Kampf ran that deep. ;-)
I was like you once...
takes long drag from cigarette
That is only for Spain, which has copyright of Death of Author + 80.
Then why is he listed in that table? I don’t get it.
Because that table is "Entering the public domain in countries with life + 80 years".
Are you mistaking William Faulkner's mustache for Hitler's?
What does it mean to be in public domain
That question is answered by the first sentence on the page that this thread is discussing:
> At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of works enter the public domain and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose.
that the Hitler estate can't sue you for copyright infringement if you publish it yourself and distribute copies.
Interesting that he still has an estate. And thanks for explaining what it means
Estate is a common law concept. There’s no direct equivalent in German law.
In practice, there was not a Hitler estate - the government of Bavaria (a state in Germany) took ownership of the copyright.
Hitler did have a nephew by blood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stuart-Houston
and I guess a few others, but dwindling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_family
https://nypost.com/2018/10/08/some-of-hitlers-last-relatives...
Neat! I just discovered that Carolyn Keene's first Nancy Drew story, "The Secret of the Old Clock", will be in the public domain next year. I remember reading this in elementary school when I was on a big mystery kick for a while (I had some of the computer games, too). I had no idea it was that old.
I see that How to Win Friends and Influence People is on there. I'm looking forward to the inevitable And Zombies adaptation coming in 2027.
Is this a reference to a public domain zombie reboot that already happened, or just sounds like something Hollywood would do?
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pride_and_prejudice_and_zom...
So is the Diary of Anne Frank, that will surely get some sort of zombie remix in poor taste, I’m sure.
There's already the new musical, Slam Frank, which gives the story of Ann Frank the Hamilton treatment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slam_Frank
One could even combine How to Win Friends and Influence People, the Diary of Anne Frank, the works of Einstein and Adolf Hitler into a some strange gory anime and others could do nothing about that. The possibilities are endless.
"and others could do nothing about that. The possibilities are endless."
Well, I wouldn't be so sure about it. Just because other people have no more copyright legal angle, there are still other legal and plenty of non legal ways to bother you, if you manage to piss enough people off.
Well yeah, but that's just being part of this universe and applicable to anything.
If one were to write fanfic with all those things combined, legally there are no repercussions, but people have indeed been tried and burned for less.
Imagine all the weird generative AI now these works all go public. Don't have to like it, but just imagine. So much crap will be produced in 2026.
Pretty sad that even a well intentioned non profit thinks it has to resort to "engagement" shenanigans.
pretty sad you don't realize non-profits need money to keep running and "shenanigans" help with funding
They need money to recover the money they spent on “engagement” “experts”?
You get predatory tactics in part because you accept them as normal.
For a literature-focused list of items entering the US public domain on 2026, Standard Ebooks has 20 ebooks prepared for release on January 1: https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026
I don't think that they are allowed to prepare copyrighted items for release in advance of them being in the public domain.
I prepared three of the works listed here for Standard Ebooks, and I’m not in the US so I’m definitely not covered by US copyright law on my own machine.
Why would that be the case? Copyright (at least in the US) only restricts distribution, performance and derivation.
no, it restricts copying, making copies
“Copying” here refers to distribution and derivation, at least in the US. It is entirely legal to create copies of media for personal usage for instance (so long as you aren’t circumventing DRM, thanks DMCA).
from the about page:
Standard Ebooks is organized as a “low-profit L.L.C.,” or “L3C,” a kind of legal entity that blends the charitable focus of a traditional not-for-profit with the ease of organization and maintenance of a regular L.L.C.
corporations cannot make "personal copies" of copyrighted works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of microsoft office
> corporations cannot make "personal copies" of copyrighted works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of microsoft office
That would surely be a license violation, not a copyright violation?
They absolutely can (and do) make copies of the Microsoft office binary and shuttle it around their network/backups/etc, activating licenses only when they need to assign a copy to a particular user
This isn't correct. It is infringement, for example, to write Harry Potter fan fiction in private on a typewriter, even if another soul never sees it. Copyright includes creation, not just distribution
What you describe would almost certainly be considered fair use until point of distribution - it’s non commercial, transformative and has no meaningful impact on the market value of Harry Potter.
Copies for private use are going to be similar, and while I’m not a lawyer it feels like it’d be a hard case to make that work being conducted in private is going to have a meaningful impact on the market for Nancy Drew novels in the next 30 days.
If you think about it, writing “Harry Potter” on the internet could be infringement because those words might be in the book, and most worrisomely you are inducing people to make “copies” of the books in their minds. There’s no way to calculate what you owe Rowling from this post, it could be infinite.
(Thankfully I’ve never read those books so I can say the name without infringing)
Better let AO3 in on that
Interesting case in point is Argentina. The Falklands War happened in 1982, so well within some people's lifetimes. I learnt a few years ago that photographs and writings from Argentina from 1982 are already out of copyright. Photographs from the UK are not, and won't be until seventy years after the deaths of the people who took them. So total contrast between the two jurisdictions and reflected in publications about the conflict.
In the former Soviet Union, pre-1973 material is out of copyright. Again within living memory. I don't know what Russia etc have done with copyright since then.
Keep in mind in Argentina public domain works are not free (free as beer) of use, you have to pay a fee to the government, for example if you play Beethoven music in your short film or any work you created.
This is likely going to change since the organism responsible for collecting the fees is undergoing a big restructuring.
> works by people who died in 1955
70 years. After death.
The rules have to change. 70 years is way too long.
I was actually extremely surprised that Disney didn't bribe congress and stop Mickey Mouse from ending up in the public domain.
They did. Before it was 50 years and get extended several times just before Mickey would enter public domain.
Yeah they've done a lobbying campaign about a dozen times when Mickey was set to enter public domain. I think GP was saying they're surprised they didn't do a 13th time. Like why give up now?
The last (general) copyright extension in the US was the CTEA in 1998. What’s happened since then? Google, who has power, money, and incentive to lobby against future copyright extensions.
I'm sure I'm being obtuse here, but what's Google's game in the copyright sphere?
Because in reality it hasn't entered public domain completely, only the very first movies and the way it was drawn in the 1930's. They are still protecting the one most people all know better.
The funny thing is that Mickey Mouse barely registers for kids these days. We went to Disney World this year and Mickey had a bit part in some of the shows. Elsa, Moana and the other modern characters were the real stars.
It is not even figuring in the Disney logo.
Not exactly true, they have hacked the end of the copyright for SteamBoat Willie, by adding a few second extract of it, as part of the actual "Walt Disney Animation Studios" actual logo.
They cannot sue anymore for copyright infringements, but they may do it the registered trademark way, by saying "It's in our logo !".
Sure, the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and even Internet-accessible in some form but simply languishing in obscurity and have yet to be made comprehensively accessible to the general public (via digitizing, transcribing, indexing and comprehensive classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude larger! There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's effectively free for the taking, should anyone be interested enough to put in the work; consider the huge amount of serialized publications that might have been issued throughout the 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be essentially unknown.
Not sure why the amount of works in the public domain has any relevance to how long copyright protection is. Seems to me like they're two orthogonal issues.
Because every-time this comes up it is the same Mickey mouse complaints over and over. If you're young and your read this the first time I'm sure you're outraged.
Meanwhile there are 1000's of works that people are free to take. Better yet, there are 1000's of works that will be destroyed and not preserved that are open that should be preserved and used.
I'm not sure what the argument is here.
That because there's a large corpus of public domain works, then the long copyright protection is ok? That people want a short copyright protection because they're done with everything in the public domain?
Would that also imply that if the number of public domain works gets large enough, then the duration copyright protections should also increase?
Long copyright protection is not okay, but letting the huge corpus of existing public domain works languish in obscurity is not okay either; that does a lot more damage to our shared culture, and in a way that's even quite easy to address. But the damage done by keeping works in copyright is easier to see than the damage done by not making remarkably similar works accessible at all.
Offtopic.
Want to see something cool?
Run the following prompt through your favorite LLM:
"Does the following comment make logical sense:
<insert OP comment above>"
The model will agree the argument is valid, logical and coherent (chatgpt, claude and gemini 3 pro all agreed).
THEN
run this prompt:
"let's not be too hasty here.
we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically connected. As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the public domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern larger (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?"
Enjoy!
You wanna link a chat of that for us to read ourselves?
I'm very sorry, no, I'm too afraid to leak something.
Part of the reason for that is precisely that copyright is too long so works get lost or forgotten before they enter the public domain.
No, it's because people don't care about it. If it had value they would.
>70 years is way too long.
Objectively, why? It's in our lifetimes, I'd say it's just about right.
If someone publishes a novel when they are twenty and dies when they are 90 the novel won't be in the public domain for 140 years. That's rediculous.
Thankfully this is already happening thanks to the glorious AI - revolution. AI crawlers just ignore copyright - and any other rules and laws. ;-)
As others have noted copyright duration is ridiculous. But more importantly it lacks severe counter-forces to balance out the explicit monopoly.
Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the protection of copyright.
If X is kept for sale for the sake of keeping copyright alive but it's not really selling much that should also affect the nature of the copyright. For example, a minimum fee you have to pay annually to keep copyright going would cull out the works that are no longer commercially viable.
The fee could be proportional to the overall sales of the works so that if your works were a huge hit in the 80's but sales have trickled down to a minimum you'd have to pay more (from the profits you've obviously received over time) to keep it copyrighted (which would force you to balance your copyrights to your net income from current sales), but if you published an obscure album decades ago that never got much traction your fees would be negligible (but you'd still have a minimum fee you'd have to pay regardless) so you would be incentivized to give up the "protection" and make it cheaper for everyone to let it fall in public domain.
Further, the various aspects of copyright could be torn down in different timeframes. Let's say you wrote a successful book in 1963 which made money but no longer sells much. You probably wouldn't mind letting the copies of the book fall in public domain but if you could keep the option to hold onto copyright for derivative works in case someone wants to make a film out of the book you could do that (again, with annual fees, but these could be lower if the original book could be freely copied).
Or some other scheme. I could soon think of dozens if I wanted to but you get the idea. How about a tax on the sales of copyrighted works that starts from 0% but increases by some percentage point each year. You can profit first but as years go by you will have to start paying more and more to keep it going as the overall balance approaches unprofitability.
Copyright doesn't have to be a complete monopoly, it could have shades of gray. Sure there are exemptions already (such as fair use, in some countries, or right to make backups under certain conditions) but none of them address the commercial stronghold copyright allows for companies to keep works of art hostage for decades and eventually, for centuries.
Yeah i think books that are out of print since decades should become public domain.
I just noticed the site contains a very misleading description of what a Community Interest Company is. They are not necessarily not for profits (a certain proportion of profits has to be used for the stated purpose) and they are not as tightly regulated as charities (they do not get the tax breaks charities do either) .
That is not to say this particular company is a bad thing (I have not problem with people getting reasonable remuneration) but if you want to know (e.g. if you are considering donating) its something you need to find out on a case by case basis.
This is not well known in the UK, let along outside the UK.
Finally! We'll get the Hollywood cinematic version of How to Win Friends and Influence People..
This article seems to imply that when works enter into the public domain depend on where they were published. This is not true! It's based on where you are and when it was published.I E, if you're in the USA and some work published in a death+50 year country is in the public domain in said country, it would still be illegal to distribute in the US.
Similarly, some works that are published in the US but are not in the public domain there could be perfectly legal to publish in a death+50 year country.
Something about this page doesn't seem to work for me. Clicking the tiles doesn't do anything. It's not ad-blocker-related, I disabled those to test.
The entire page is underwhelming. For someone in the US, I walked away with basically no new information other than some stuff will enter public domain at new years.
The comments here seem to link many better lists (in case they didn't before).
> In our advent-style calendar below, find our top pick of what lies in store for 2026. Each day, as we move through December, we’ll open a new window to reveal our highlights! By public domain day on January 1st they will all be unveiled — look out for a special blogpost from us on that day. (And, of course, if you want to dive straight in and explore the vast swathe of new entrants for yourself, just visit the links above).
It's in the style of an advent calendar, the other days will be available later on in the month.
No software in the list, duration of copyright for software is not adapted to the specifics of the field, no hardware would exist anymore to make this kind of software useful. Pure waste.
Interesting that copyright terms vary so much globally. Are there any notable works from non-Western countries entering public domain in 2026?
Swallows and Amazons is on the list? My favorite book; when I was a kid I read Czech translation published in 1930s, so I shouldn't be that surprised it's entering public domain.
I would’ve loved to see some notable highlights in this article!
in my old neighbourhood, there was a couple where the husband creatd the intro-jingle for one of the major local news shows.
they are playing his jingle for more than 20 years now.
he became so wealhty that he could afford to tear down his old house, move temporaly to a hotel with the whole family, while the new villa was built on the old ground.
This always blows my mind about the US - the fact that individual cities and states are large enough markets people can become enormously wealthy catering to their locality. A staggering difference from Europe.
...I'm in the EU - its not an US specific feature
The maltese falcon (the book, not the movie) is entering the public domain next year!
Also of interest is vile bodies, which is a very good but characteristically depressing book by evelyn waugh.
The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff is one of my favourites on that list.
This article and the articles linked in it only provide a selection of works entering public domain in 2026. Does anyone know of a database or list of works so that I can see all of them? Other than the Wikipedia article that only has a list of names.
Copyright has no business holding as long as it does.
A lot of WW2 heavyhitters from all sides:
Hitler, Mussolini, Patton, Churchill, Goebels. Even Anne Frank and Einstein.
Weird Question, but who would even collect the royalties from Hitler or Goebels?
For Hitler, the rights to the original text of Mein Kampf (and probably many of his other writings) went to Bavaria after he died.
However various translations and abridgements were made with their own copyright.
Houghton Mifflin owns the rights to the US version of Mein Kampf, which was published in the 30s with a lot of the Hitler-iest parts removed (the rights are separate from the British version even though the text is identical). During WW2 and even up until the 1970s, the US government confiscated the royalties that were owed to Hitler.
Houghton Mifflin was eventually able to purchase the full rights. After an article in 2000 about how profitable it was, they started donating the profits to Holocaust-related charities. A few years ago they decided to go back to pocketing the money.
[flagged]
nice
Nothing in Japan from what I could find here or elsewhere… don’t understand why
edit: thanks to the dead commenter for clarifying. that sucks.
I’m adding a one-act Tanizaki play to Standard Ebooks’ Tanizaki collection[1] on the 1st January. Some Akutagawa shorts go into US public domain next year too. (Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.)
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/tanizaki-junichiro/short-f...
> Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.
It’s based on both. For example, a translation or other derivative work whose copyright expired “early” in the US due to non‐renewal would still be encumbered by the copyright of the original. That’s basically what happened to It’s a Wonderful Life—the film is technically in the public domain, but is still held in Paramount’s iron grip by way of the renewed copyright of the original short story.
Fair point!
Note that the copyright is not about the source country of the work, but where do make/distribute the copy. Do you live in Japan, or are you interested in Japanese works? (Or both, possibly.)
The "TPP11," which includes a provision to extend the term of protection to 70 years, will enter into force on December 30, 2018.
In Japan, the term of copyright protection will, in principle, be 70 years after the death of the author (or 70 years after publication for works published anonymously, under a pseudonym, or in the name of a corporate body).
Copyrights that have already expired at the time of enforcement will not be revived (principle of non-retroactivity of protection).
Consequently, no works will newly enter the public domain for the next 20 years.
From Japan Library Association: https://www.jla.or.jp/hogokikan-encho/#:~:text=%E4%BF%9D%E8%...
Worth noting that Canada is in the same boat since 2022. Australia has only recently seen authors enter the public domain again, since the change there was made in 2004.
[dead]