The Books Briefing: Why We Celebrate When Copyright Expires - The Atlantic

"Belatedly, happy New Year! Here in the Books department, we like to make an extra toast for a concurrent holiday, Public Domain Day. Every January 1, the copyright protection expires on a long list of novels, movies, songs, and other works, which are then available to remix or recycle into derivative stories (the way that Disney turned a Hans Christian Andersen tale into The Little Mermaid). This year heralds the liberation in the United States of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the song “Singin’ in the Rain,” the earliest versions of Popeye and Tintin, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. (The groundbreaking essay, now free to publish, is being reissued in at least three new editions, including one introduced by The Atlantic’s Xochitl Gonzalez). This freedom, however, is hard-won and can be incomplete. The decades-old tussle over when a creative work becomes public property opens up deeper questions about how to balance the rights of the artist against the common good. This week, Alec Nevala-Lee examined the curious case of Sherlock Holmes...."