Public Domain Day 2020 is only a month away!

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Just after the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2020, copyrights are set to expire on whole year's worth of material.

What’s the big deal? 

Well, we'll see a massive amount of literature, music, art, movies and other creative works transition into the public domain. 



Works like George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.

When a work enters into the public domain, it can be freely republished, repurposed, remixed and reused without having to get permissions or pay use fees to copyright holders, fostering new and creative uses unfettered by intellectual property rights or use restrictions.

All works first published in the U.S. in 1924 will enter into the public domain and of last year, we'll see a rolling wall of copyright expirations each year. For instance, in January 2021, all works first published in 1925 will enter in public domain and the year after that, works from 1926 will become available.

If you'd like to find public domain works, here are a few places to start: Project Gutenberg, Standard eBooks, HathiTrust, LibriVox, the Public Domain Music List from pdinfo and Prints & Photographs Online from the Library of Congress.