Every year, January 1 marks a new crop of artists and artworks entering the public domain, a holiday affectionately known to some as Public Domain Day. This year, works by Henri Matisse, Robert Capa, and Frida Kahlo lose their copyright protections, as do novels like Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The comics characters of Popeye and Tintin are also entering the public domain alongside those works.
The UK-based organization Public Domain Review and Duke University’s Center for the Public Domain each published lists of works entering the public domain this week, the former with an advent-style calendar.
In the US, UK, and some European countries, works of single authorship generally retain copyright protections for the life of the author plus 70 years. However, according to the Center for the Public Domain, in the US, those protections are only guaranteed if the work in question was not otherwise registered with the copyright office or published with a copyright notice. Due to the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, works published or registered before 1978 receive a 95-year term of copyright. (Many other countries, in Asia and Africa and parts of the European Union, have a “life plus 50 years” terms for copyright.)
Works by Matisse, Capa, and Kahlo are entering the public domain because those artists all died in 1954. Meanwhile, A Farewell to Arms and The Sound and the Fury are shedding copyright protection because they were published over 95 years ago, in 1929. Similarly, Tintin and Popeye enter the public domain because Hergé and E. C. Segar first published works involving those characters in 1929.
Some other notable works of art that are now in the public domain, in case you want to remix them accordingly:
- Films: Blackmail (dir. Alfred Hitchcock), Dynamite (dir. Cecil B. DeMille)
- Books: Cup of Gold (John Steinbeck), A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf), the original German edition of Letters to a Young Poet (Rainer Maria Rilke)
- Music: The 1929 recording of Rhapsody in Blue (George Gershwin), compositions for Singin’ in the Rain (lyrics by Arthur Freed, music by Nacio Herb Brown), Boléro (Maurice Ravel)
- Visual Art: Salvador Dalí’s Illumined Pleasures, The Accommodations of Desire, and The Great Masturbator, all of which were published in La Révolution surréaliste in 1929 or featured in an exhibition the same year
Still, as the Center fo the Public Domain outlines, determining copyright protections for individual works of visual art is particularly tricky, given the sometimes conflicting creation and publication dates that are available. Finding a definitive answer requires consulting art historians and combing through catalogues and magazines of the era, as the organization demonstrates in this blog post, using René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images as an example.
All of which is to say, best to do some legal research before starting your global Matisse cut-out T-shirt business.
