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In 1998, Congress halted the flow of copyright works to the public domain with the passage of the Copyright Term Extension Act, extending protections for works published before 1978 from 75 to 95 years. But on Jan. 1, 2019 , without a new extension, the first batch of works in two decades became public.
That is undoubtedly a good thing. Without copyright protection, those works will be both more accessible and cheaper. New editions can be printed, online copies posted for free, and new audio recordings shared. Sequels, spin offs, fan fiction and parodies are also all fair game, opening up new creative possibilities and giving new life to old stories.
The only reason the copyright protection had been extended was to appease corporate interests — specifically, to appease Disney. Fearing that it would lose protection over Mickey Mouse, the Walt Disney Company had pushed for the extension of copyright protections in 1990. The estate of celebrated composer George Gershwin, along with Time Warner, Viacom, and professional sports leagues, among others, all supported the law as it protected their profits. In 1998, those cooperate interests won government protection for another 20 years.
Now, those years are up. So, what better way to celebrate the end to one of the clearest examples of crony capitalism than to go out and make use of the newly released works?
Already, many of the materials released are widely available on free platforms like Google Books or HathiTrust, which were ready to go live with the drop of the ball on New Year’s Eve. Among such favorites are Robert Frost’s ” Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” George Gershwin’s “Stop Flirting,” Marcel Duchamp’s original “ The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),” and Marcel Proust’s The Prisoner ( La Prisonniere, vol. 5 of In Search of Lost Time), although you’ll have to wait for the English translations, which have copyrights of the own.
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That, after all, is more in the spirit of the constitutional authorization for Congress to use intellectual property protection “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.”
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Two decades ago, Congress bowed to corporate interests on copyright; in 2019, some works are finally free https://t.co/JcEcedoVU2
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) January 3, 2019
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