The Atlantic: The Great American Novel enters the public domain on January 1, 2019—quite literally. Not the concept, but the book by William Carlos Williams. It will be joined by hundreds of thousands of other books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923. It’s the first time since 1998 for a mass shift to the public domain of material protected under copyright. It’s also the beginning of a new annual tradition: For several decades from 2019 onward, each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.
2 comments:
I think this is awesome. There are so many creative works that would benefit immensely by being put out into the public domain. This will give a great many people the chance to revisit a work and to take and build upon that work thereby creating a whole new work that could continue the conversation or start a new dialogue with regards to some of the more controversial works. It’s good that Congress finally got around to fixing all of the loopholes that other companies have been using for a long time. This will be especially useful to playwrights who can now have access to books that are no longer in print but that were some of the greatest literary works in their day. Or how about the next big musical because there is a story somewhere in those files waiting to be discovered and I can’t wait to see that happen.
I think this will actually be really great for the theatre industry, especially for smaller theatre like community or high school spaced that don't have the money to secure rights to shows all of the time. This will open up a whole new world of possibilities for these spaces, who can now perform, somewhat, more current of popular musicals and plays, or adapt books into plays, and any other creative things they want to do with this newly released content. I am really excited to see what comes out of this release of content, and how especially the theatre world will change now that there is a ton of "new" work to be performed without having to deal with rights. I know many high school theatre teachers will be excited as well, allowing the to expand beyond just Shakespeare to more public domain works that they can use in classes that all students can have full access to.
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