Did you ring in 2019 by making a toast to all the new material that entered the public domain? You should have! This is a huge deal! On January 1st, new works were added to the U. S. public domain for the first time since 1998! The books, films, and songs that were added were copyrighted in 1923, and include such works as Kahlil Gibran"s The Prophet, Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, and "Yes! We Have No Bananas" by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn.
A bit of history: When the United States became a nation, our founding fathers included copyright law in the Constitution in order 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." Ahem. Securing for "limited Times." As the years went by, those limited times became longer and longer. The initial term set up in the Constitution was work for 14 years, with the option to renew the copyright for another 14 years if the creator was still living. After this period was over, the copyrighted work then entered the public domain, and anyone could use, print, or publish it as he or she pleased. This first law applied only to “Maps, Charts, and Books,” not to newspaper articles or musical compositions.
In 1831 the period of initial coverage was extended to 28 years, with an option to renew the copyright for 14 years. This 1831 revision also expanded the act to include all types of works – including musical compositions, in the form of sheet music. The renewal period was increased again, to 28 years, in 1909. The next major revision to the law was the Copyright Act of 1976. This revision was made so that the law to get more up-to-date with the way that recording technology had advanced during the twentieth century, but it also greatly increased the length of the copyright term to the life of the author plus another 50 years.
As an example, the song “Old Time Rock and Roll” was released by Bob Seger in 1978 (the year that the 1976 copyright law went into effect) when he was 33 years old. If Seger lives to be 80 years old, the copyright of “Old Time Rock and Roll” will last until the year 2075 – almost 100 years after it was written. However, copyright terms were made even longer with the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This act, also called the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act due to the singer-turned-legislator who championed it, extended copyright protection lengths by 20 years. This makes “Old Time Rock and Roll” copyrighted until 2095 – assuming Bob Seger lives to be 80 years old.
Because this last extension was enacted in 1998, it extended the protection of the things that were about to enter the public domain, including the works mentioned above, which resulted in a 20-year drought of new works. That's what made January 1, 2019 so exciting. A rich public domain is absolutely essential to creativity in all art forms; anyone who has tried to create anything knows that there are no original ideas. We stand on the shoulders of Aldous Huxley, "Jelly Roll" Morton, Buster Keaton, Carl Sandberg, Béla Bartók, and Charlie Chaplin (all of whom created works that just entered the public domain!) as we create our own art.
So go crazy! Use these works as inspiration, quote them, cut them up, comment on them, mash them together - use them as raw material for your own creative endeavors. You'll be doing what the founders of our nation considered essential to promoting progress!
N.B. Some of the writing about U. S. copyright law history comes from my dissertation, Mashups: History, Legality, and Aesthetics (2011).