The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living.
I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.
I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?
I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain a reasonable number of years after that sale.
I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world he would take it good and proper.
Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously.
finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.
I think we should mix in some compulsory licensing: IE, the copyright holder has exclusive rights for a period of time, and then afterwards there is a formula that's used to allow anyone to re-publish.
It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high.
(This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)
Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be extended after the fact for already being profitable? That only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright already does, to the detriment of everyone else.
Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have.
The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.
>exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer
The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public domain to mix in to future culture.
That's the point.
The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing for economies and societies.
Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work or creation is called stagnation and is bad, in the same way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a patent forever just because it was effective.
Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy should never have the resources to extend it past a short time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, not a creative or artist and copyright is not intended to protect them.
Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short while to spend time creating your next work. Copyright is not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work.
A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources at all is inherently anti-meritocratic.
I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al.
The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits.
Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.
So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each.
Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.
> Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects.
An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.
> I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income for my offspring after I pass.
Having children (and even grandchildren) coast on work that was created decades ago is ludicrous IMHO. If you can't profit off your work after 14+14 years (as per above) then I'm not sure what you're doing, but it's not (economically) beneficial to society.
> They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
Copyright is a practical compromise between society and them; their interests are not absolute.
Sounds a bit unlikely, that most of them will make a living with stuff older than 14 or 28 years, their legacy creations. Sounds more like they are chasing a dream, which most likely will not be achieved by most of them.
Lot's of people are short sighted, like children who would consume candy every day if their parents didn't tell them no. Current copyright laws allowed Disney to essentially buy up all of popular culture. This has not been a good thing for the world.
Its a shame that people who supposedly work "in the arts" can be so blind to the world.
Of course they are. If I could arrange for someone to hand me money over the course of my entire life for work I did 25 years ago, I'd absolutely take that deal.
... it may not be in society's best interest to offer it to me though.
(Honestly, the better deal would be for society to hand all of us money from a giant taxation pool monthly and, freed up from the need to put so many hours into working to eat, we could do a lot more writing, performing, and general making-of-art and fundamental-no-capitalist-benefit scientific exploration).
Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture is a great read in this space. It discusses all the societal issues with long copyright terms. Mostly, long copyright terms are driven by Mickey Mouse. Every time Mickey is near going into the public domain, Disney lobbies Congress for an extension. This has an impact on culture in that culture is a mashup of all the things that have gone before. Disney, for instance, made a fortune making animated movies based on stories that were existing fairy tales and legends and therefore out of copyright. Now, Disney wants to prevent others from doing the same with its characters. Yes, we want creators compensated. But we can do that without letting copyright policy be driven by the special interests of a global mega corporation like Disney.
It's understandable that disney wants to hold Mickey as their symbol, I do not blame them for it, but, ironically as a child, I did not know Mickey Mouse, and I bet even fewer children know who Mickey Mouse is now.
This is largely a moot point unless the US wants to withdraw from TRIPS (and implicitly the WTO) and join the list of countries that don't observe it such as... Eritrea, Kiribati, North Korea, South Sudan, and Turkmenistan.
Under the 14+14 law, even if an author chose to renew the copyright, most people could remix games (that had gone into the public domain) that were released when they were in their teens, with their kids (if they had any), which sounds amazing - I'd love to do that with my kids, or hit up my parents and find a game from their childhood and mess around with it.
Being able to riff on something in the public domain that was only made 28 years ago is categorically different than something made 70-120 years ago. I think the impact to the commons would be huge.
I like the idea I heard about taxing based on the owner's view of value.
Give 14 years free.
Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them some (smallish) percentage of that.
Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and then the work is in the public domain.
Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.
Citizens united maybe? when corporations have liability they’re a group and no one is responsible. when they want to assert rights and make $ “they’re an individual” it’s complete corruption
Especially now in a world where creating and publicizing abstract ideas is easier than ever, anything we're worried about people losing in duration they can make up for in volume.
And given that the actual purpose of copyright (in the US at least) is promoting the sciences and "useful" arts, making people a little "hungrier" by loosening the protection seems to be the way society should tilt.
And if you think that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have all hijacked it to train their models, it's kind of crazy that these are only limitations applied to private persons or small companies, but don't touch big corps at all.
This whole thing pisses me off so much. I would be fine with an absolute anarchy in which copyright and patents no longer exist but these same dickheads have been terrorizing the entire planet with lawsuits and DRM for downloading Metallica CDs for the last 30 years and even now they don't actually want to reform the copyright system, just grant themselves a special exception because everything is supposed to unconditionally work in their favor regardless of circumstances.
We've endlessly talked about it here on HN and I think most people agree. I'm in favor of charging the copyright holder and increasing amount (doubles every 5 years or so), which eventually forces them to give up paying for so many different copyrighted works, and also if the work is insanely old, they would cost way above ROI.
Alternatively sell "Subscription Copyright" licenses that renew every 10 years at 10 million dollars, that's per story, so Disney would have to renew for all of their movies, every 10 years. Could probably put that revenue to better use somewhere else anyway.
Why not just consume public-domain IP to begin with? The "Classics" of Western literature used to be viewed as the necessary foundation of a proper education in the humanities; and today you could add "classic" works from other literary traditions (India, China, etc.) for an even more well-rounded approach.
Classics absolutely matter and we should read more of them, but relying only on public domain works ignores how cultural participation is driven by shared contemporary moments. The ever-changing stream of new content is critical for our social experience.
It's also it's necessary that we have culture that is recognisable in our own lives. Pride and Prejudice is a great book, but it's arguably more alien than Star Trek.
My friends and I have been doing a book club like this online for years, where we only read books in the public domain. It’s been an amazing experience and I think we look forward to it each week. https://b00k.club
In A Sinking Island, the critic Hugh Kenner makes the case that the British Copyright Act of 1911, extending copyright from 42 years after first publication, or seven years after the author's death, to fifty years after the author's death, had an arresting effect on public perception of what literature was:
By inhibiting cheap reprints of everything published after 1870, the Act helped reinforce a genteel impression that English literature itself had stopped about that date...
Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) has only recently entered the public domain for life+50 countries due to JRR Tolkien dying in 1973, despite the work being over 70 years old. It won't enter the public domain in life+70 countries until 2044.
Only recently are works written in the early to mid 1900s being released in the public domain. This limits the works to around the first world war. For example:
- HG Wells (Died 1946, Life+70 in 2017), works like War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
- LM Montgomery (Died 1942, Life+70 in 2013), works like Anne of Green Gables -- In the US where publication + 90 years is in effect, her later works (after ~1925) are not yet in the public domain there.
With comic IPs, most are not yet in the public domain:
- Superman (1938, P+95 of 2034) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
- Batman (1939, P+95 of 2035) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
So the current copyright terms are very limiting for IPs that are nearly a decade old.
Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff that's been translated in the past few decades and those aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
It allows you the freedom to publish works in those worlds, reference characters, etc. See for example the horror game Alice: Madness Returns based on the Alice in Wonderland series.
What about making people profit and enjoy life without having to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to make them worth having them alive?
The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one.
Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that.
The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions.
If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter, because it would reduce the risk of entrenching the differences or giving too much power to a few.
I find more important what is the society's perceived "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy / depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless and starving.
In other countries "success" can be considered also about "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...
Does the Internet Archive provide any instruction to uploaders and users about how to go about uploading and downloading copyright-expired public domain works legally, given the geographical differences from region to region on copyright expiration? For example, does the Internet Archive host its servers in USA, and would that make the US copyright expiry law operative? Or does it have servers in Europe or Asia (more lenient copyright expiration laws) that can be intentionally uploaded to, and leaving it to users to download from their respective regional locations on their own cognizances (i.e. at their own risk)?
It's absolutely ridiculous and has almost everything to do with Disney trying to maintain their hold on Mickey Mouse. Every single time his expiration came up they managed to lobby for an extension and now we're left with this current mess of a system
Neat! I just discovered that Carolyn Keene's first Nancy Drew story, "The Secret of the Old Clock", will be in the public domain next year. I remember reading this in elementary school when I was on a big mystery kick for a while (I had some of the computer games, too). I had no idea it was that old.
I prepared three of the works listed here for Standard Ebooks, and I’m not in the US so I’m definitely not covered by US copyright law on my own machine.
Sure, the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and even Internet-accessible in some form but simply languishing in obscurity and have yet to be made comprehensively accessible to the general public (via digitizing, transcribing, indexing and comprehensive classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude larger! There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's effectively free for the taking, should anyone be interested enough to put in the work; consider the huge amount of serialized publications that might have been issued throughout the 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be essentially unknown.
Not sure why the amount of works in the public domain has any relevance to how long copyright protection is. Seems to me like they're two orthogonal issues.
Run the following prompt through your favorite LLM:
"Does the following comment make logical sense:
<insert OP comment above>"
The model will agree the argument is valid, logical and coherent (chatgpt, claude and gemini 3 pro all agreed).
THEN
run this prompt:
"let's not be too hasty here.
we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically connected. As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the public domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern larger (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?"
As do people. Which ends up weakening copyright even further as it becomes a law everyone ignores, on the level of speeding or jaywalking. The same knock-on effects as Prohibition, we become a nation of scofflaws.
People don't know copyright law. They think they do and are alright with the construct they made up in their heads. But they don't actually know what it says and does and means, otherwise they'd hate it much more.
Interesting case in point is Argentina. The Falklands War happened in 1982, so well within some people's lifetimes. I learnt a few years ago that photographs and writings from Argentina from 1982 are already out of copyright. Photographs from the UK are not, and won't be until seventy years after the deaths of the people who took them. So total contrast between the two jurisdictions and reflected in publications about the conflict.
In the former Soviet Union, pre-1973 material is out of copyright. Again within living memory. I don't know what Russia etc have done with copyright since then.
Keep in mind in Argentina public domain works are not free (free as beer) of use, you have to pay a fee to the government, for example if you play Beethoven music in your short film or any work you created.
This is likely going to change since the organism responsible for collecting the fees is undergoing a big restructuring.
I would love to see a public poll on how long people think that copyright should be. I'm betting that the majority of the answers from normal people will be less than the current "author's lifetime plus 70 years" but also greater than 5 years. This is probably not a very profitable poll for Gallup to do, though...
My answer is "a generation". There's so many ideas and behaviors that don't persist between generations that it seems as natural of a division as you could have.
The median age of new mothers is 27 around here, which seems about right.
There are answer is no, but they’re ignoring the fact that when works enter the public domain they will invariably spawn horror movies “based” on the work. Pooh: Blood and Honey is the warning sign we all ignored to our detriment and now we’ll all have to watch the slasher version of T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” in 2026.
The entire page is underwhelming. For someone in the US, I walked away with basically no new information other than some stuff will enter public domain at new years.
> In our advent-style calendar below, find our top pick of what lies in store for 2026. Each day, as we move through December, we’ll open a new window to reveal our highlights! By public domain day on January 1st they will all be unveiled — look out for a special blogpost from us on that day. (And, of course, if you want to dive straight in and explore the vast swathe of new entrants for yourself, just visit the links above).
As others have noted copyright duration is ridiculous. But more importantly it lacks severe counter-forces to balance out the explicit monopoly.
Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the protection of copyright.
If X is kept for sale for the sake of keeping copyright alive but it's not really selling much that should also affect the nature of the copyright. For example, a minimum fee you have to pay annually to keep copyright going would cull out the works that are no longer commercially viable.
The fee could be proportional to the overall sales of the works so that if your works were a huge hit in the 80's but sales have trickled down to a minimum you'd have to pay more (from the profits you've obviously received over time) to keep it copyrighted (which would force you to balance your copyrights to your net income from current sales), but if you published an obscure album decades ago that never got much traction your fees would be negligible (but you'd still have a minimum fee you'd have to pay regardless) so you would be incentivized to give up the "protection" and make it cheaper for everyone to let it fall in public domain.
Further, the various aspects of copyright could be torn down in different timeframes. Let's say you wrote a successful book in 1963 which made money but no longer sells much. You probably wouldn't mind letting the copies of the book fall in public domain but if you could keep the option to hold onto copyright for derivative works in case someone wants to make a film out of the book you could do that (again, with annual fees, but these could be lower if the original book could be freely copied).
Or some other scheme. I could soon think of dozens if I wanted to but you get the idea. How about a tax on the sales of copyrighted works that starts from 0% but increases by some percentage point each year. You can profit first but as years go by you will have to start paying more and more to keep it going as the overall balance approaches unprofitability.
Copyright doesn't have to be a complete monopoly, it could have shades of gray. Sure there are exemptions already (such as fair use, in some countries, or right to make backups under certain conditions) but none of them address the commercial stronghold copyright allows for companies to keep works of art hostage for decades and eventually, for centuries.
> Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
> If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the protection of copyright.
Suppose Lucy paints original portraits of Barbra Streisand and sells them on eBay. She makes no copies of them; there are no copies of them for her to sell.
And Lucy is just a painter. She's not a printer. She's not a publisher. Again: Lucy only paints portraits of Barbra Streisand and sells them on eBay. That's all that she does.
But because Lucy isn't selling copies, then the portraits become public domain and anyone is free to copy them.
Why would that ever be a thing that encourages Lucy to paint more portraits of Barbra Streisand?
At the very least a system like this might force publishers to not drop ebooks from their stores just because.
But others would point out that being able to not distribute a work is part of having the copyright. If a corporation doesn't want to sell old works because they want to encourage people to only buy new works then that's their right. The government saying that it's fair game simply because there's no legal option to purchase it is an infringement on their right to withhold the work from the public. They could even have a policy of destroying all copies of the work once it goes off sale to make sure it never enters the public domain, that's also within their rights.
Entering PD at death+70y usually means a 100+-20y duration. Does anyone respect this silly timescale? Does any fine been imposed for a forgotten old work?
Compare that with a drug's IP: total of 20 years after the molecule patent, of which 8-10y in clinical trials and only 10-12y in profitable life. But everyone respects that until the last day and it brings billions back.
A short IP time would favor the small/poor creators that could earn something during their lifetime when the work is fresh, while a long one favors companies like Disney which can protect the copyright with their group of lawyers.
Here in Canada, nothing. Thanks to the retroactive copyright extension which increased the copyright period to 70 years, nothing will enter the public domain in Canada until 2042.
No software in the list, duration of copyright for software is not adapted to the specifics of the field, no hardware would exist anymore to make this kind of software useful. Pure waste.
I just noticed the site contains a very misleading description of what a Community Interest Company is. They are not necessarily not for profits (a certain proportion of profits has to be used for the stated purpose) and they are not as tightly regulated as charities (they do not get the tax breaks charities do either) .
That is not to say this particular company is a bad thing (I have not problem with people getting reasonable remuneration) but if you want to know (e.g. if you are considering donating) its something you need to find out on a case by case basis.
This is not well known in the UK, let along outside the UK.
Swallows and Amazons is on the list? My favorite book; when I was a kid I read Czech translation published in 1930s, so I shouldn't be that surprised it's entering public domain.
This article seems to imply that when works enter into the public domain depend on where they were published. This is not true! It's based on where you are and when it was published.I E, if you're in the USA and some work published in a death+50 year country is in the public domain in said country, it would still be illegal to distribute in the US.
Similarly, some works that are published in the US but are not in the public domain there could be perfectly legal to publish in a death+50 year country.
in my old neighbourhood, there was a couple where the husband creatd the intro-jingle for one of the major local news shows.
they are playing his jingle for more than 20 years now.
he became so wealhty that he could afford to tear down his old house, move temporaly to a hotel with the whole family, while the new villa was built on the old ground.
This always blows my mind about the US - the fact that individual cities and states are large enough markets people can become enormously wealthy catering to their locality. A staggering difference from Europe.
This article and the articles linked in it only provide a selection of works entering public domain in 2026. Does anyone know of a database or list of works so that I can see all of them? Other than the Wikipedia article that only has a list of names.
There wasn't easy hover text or other way to reveal what's coming "this month" on their advent calendar. So spoilers for the impatient:
1 William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying
2 Arthur Ransome – Swallows and Amazons
3 Albert Einstein
4 Nan Shepherd – The Weatherhouse
5 Langston Hughes – Not Without Laughter
6 Wallace Stevens
7 Hermann Hesse – Narcissus and Goldmund
8 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film)
9 Barbara Hepworth
10 Evelyn Waugh – Vile Bodies
11 Geoffrey Dennis – The End of the World
12 Charlie Parker
13 Margaret Ayer Barnes – Years of Grace
14 Hellbound Train
15 Hannah Arendt
16 Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities
17 T. S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday
18 Thomas Mann
19 Agatha Christie – The Murder at the Vicarage
20 Franz Kafka – The Castle (English translation)
21 Walker Evans
22 Sigmund Freud – Civilization and Its Discontents
23 Stella Benson – The Far-Away Bride
24 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
25 E. H. Young – Miss Mole
26 P. G. Wodehouse
27 Vladimir Nabokov – The Defense
28 Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon
29 Roger Mais
30 Saadat Hasan Manto
31 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – Insatiability
I’m adding a one-act Tanizaki play to Standard Ebooks’ Tanizaki collection[1] on the 1st January. Some Akutagawa shorts go into US public domain next year too. (Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.)
> Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.
It’s based on both. For example, a translation or other derivative work whose copyright expired “early” in the US due to non‐renewal would still be encumbered by the copyright of the original. That’s basically what happened to It’s a Wonderful Life—the film is technically in the public domain, but is still held in Paramount’s iron grip by way of the renewed copyright of the original short story.
The "TPP11," which includes a provision to extend the term of protection to 70 years, will enter into force on December 30, 2018.
In Japan, the term of copyright protection will, in principle, be 70 years after the death of the author (or 70 years after publication for works published anonymously, under a pseudonym, or in the name of a corporate body).
Copyrights that have already expired at the time of enforcement will not be revived (principle of non-retroactivity of protection).
Consequently, no works will newly enter the public domain for the next 20 years.
Worth noting that Canada is in the same boat since 2022. Australia has only recently seen authors enter the public domain again, since the change there was made in 2004.
Note that the copyright is not about the source country of the work, but where do make/distribute the copy. Do you live in Japan, or are you interested in Japanese works? (Or both, possibly.)
For Hitler, the rights to the original text of Mein Kampf (and probably many of his other writings) went to Bavaria after he died.
However various translations and abridgements were made with their own copyright.
Houghton Mifflin owns the rights to the US version of Mein Kampf, which was published in the 30s with a lot of the Hitler-iest parts removed (the rights are separate from the British version even though the text is identical). During WW2 and even up until the 1970s, the US government confiscated the royalties that were owed to Hitler.
Houghton Mifflin was eventually able to purchase the full rights. After an article in 2000 about how profitable it was, they started donating the profits to Holocaust-related charities. A few years ago they decided to go back to pocketing the money.
Total Copyright Death. I am unconvinced that we need copyright at all, if there are strong antifraud laws that prevent people or corps from saying "I am the originator" when not the case. Copyright stifles distribution, derivative work, and longevity
I agree (and we should not need patents either), but I think it might be better to prevent you from saying that someone else wrote something if they did not write it, or to say someone else wrote it if you modified it unless you also mention that it has been modified from the original version.
I genuinely don't understand the instinct of HN to decry copyright for fictional works in general. I would not find it distasteful for even a far longer copyright to exist. I just don't see it as a problem. What is the societal ill that is caused by being unable to sell Harry Potter fan fiction, ever? Why can the author not invent his own setting? I understand people want free things, but this sentiment seems to go beyond that. The work is still available to be bought and sold, and if the price isn't right, there are billions of other options. I don't get it. I don't feel personally entitled to make derivations of Moby Dick, so if I found out it had exited public domain somehow, that would not upset me at all.
My issue isn’t so much derivative works, but the original content being sat upon by the owner and refusing to make it available to the public (for free or for sale) in any meaningful way. Keeping with the theme of Disney, I always enjoyed the Captain Eo attraction. I’d love to be able to regularly rewatch that short film. Other than a bootleg YouTube version, there is no way for me to access it right now, and there is a very real risk that Disney copyright strikes that. I just have to hope that someday Disney makes a high quality version available to me or adds it back into the park. If it were copyright free though, I might have a chance at seeing it. Now just because it’s copyright free doesn’t mean it magically appears in front of me, but it does open the door to anyone who has a high quality version squirreled away somewhere to make it available to me for sale or for free, and TWDC would be unable to stop that from happening.
As a photographer, why should I be forced to sell prints of the photographs that are hanging in a restaurant?
If the limitations on copyright weren't present, why wouldn't the restaurant make copies of the photograph that I took that they have hanging on the wall and sell it at the front door without reimbursing me in any way?
You make a good point -- it's easy to knee-jerk react based on the "I like free things" vibe and decry long-copyright as nonsensical.
I think a reasonable argument against copyright being so long is that things I experienced as a child, and especially shared experiences with others, have become a part of me: they've become shared culture, even parts of our shared language. "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting..."; still under copyright in the US for another ~15 years) is just as much a part of Christmas to me as "Angels We Have Heard on High" (public domain). Maybe a good example of this is the "Happy Birthday" song: that song is synonymous with birthdays to me and those I associate with -- if you have a birthday that song is sung, if you hear that song sung it must be somebody's birthday. Yet for the longest time it was excluded from movies, TV, radio, establishments, because somebody was thought to own the copyright for it. It was part of our shared language and experience as much as aspirin or kleenex or thermos (genericized trademarks). Similarly, "hobbit" means the same thing as "halfling" to me, but don't use the word in a published work. Eventually copyrighted works seem to become pretty genericized, much quicker than ~100 years, yet their protection remains.
Disney's Snow White is about as old now as the Brothers Grimm version was when Disney's was made. I'm not allowed to make derivative works of Disney's version; should Disney have been disallowed from making it because elements of the story were "so recent"?
Obviously people should be able to profit from their own work, but I think the "shared culture/language" aspect is a decent argument that the public has an interest that counterbalances the interests of authors/creators.
Imagine a little known work from 1920 written by an author that died in 1955 featuring a boy wizard in a magic school who's estate sues J. K. Rowling in 1998 for copyright infringement. We might never have gotten any further books.
This probably seems unlikely, but it's the flipside of exceptionally long copyrights, especially ones held by corporate interests who hire lawyers specifically to enforce copyright. The growth of AI is only going to make this more of a problem in the future. Imagine a ContentID like system but on the concepts and themes of works.
The issue is with limiting creativity in all kinds of works and areas. It would be great, if we could organize society in a way, that makes artificial limits and boundaries to information sharing unnecessary.
That is tautological. Why is limiting creativity in works and areas "the issue"? What concrete problem is happening because Mickey Mouse was under copyright until recently?
The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living.
I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.
I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?
So many ideas better than the current regime.
I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
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It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain a reasonable number of years after that sale.
I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world he would take it good and proper.
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-pete...
Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously.
finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.
I think we should mix in some compulsory licensing: IE, the copyright holder has exclusive rights for a period of time, and then afterwards there is a formula that's used to allow anyone to re-publish.
It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high.
(This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)
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Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be extended after the fact for already being profitable? That only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright already does, to the detriment of everyone else.
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> So many ideas better than the current regime.
Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have.
The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.
Which key pieces of IP are worth the exponential fees?
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Why No ip is created in a vacuum. It’s built on the ideas and concepts that came before it. It’s built on the shared open culture that we all own.
Corporations will just turn things into trademarks, like Disney did with Mickey Mouse.
Nobody who uses the word “copywritten” can be taken seriously.
Good luck with that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Enhancement_Act
>exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer
The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public domain to mix in to future culture.
That's the point.
The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing for economies and societies.
Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work or creation is called stagnation and is bad, in the same way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a patent forever just because it was effective.
Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy should never have the resources to extend it past a short time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, not a creative or artist and copyright is not intended to protect them.
Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short while to spend time creating your next work. Copyright is not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work.
A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources at all is inherently anti-meritocratic.
I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al.
The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits.
Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.
So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each.
Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.
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> Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects.
An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.
> I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income for my offspring after I pass.
Having children (and even grandchildren) coast on work that was created decades ago is ludicrous IMHO. If you can't profit off your work after 14+14 years (as per above) then I'm not sure what you're doing, but it's not (economically) beneficial to society.
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> They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
Copyright is a practical compromise between society and them; their interests are not absolute.
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When asked "do you want more or less income?", most people, including me, will answer "more".
That doesn't mean it's always the right decision.
Of course they do, their bias is to keep all the cards in their favor. Our (the consumer's) bias is to shorten copyright.
Remember, ultimately it is the consumer who pays the creator; thus the consumer has a vested interest in negotiating how long copyright should last.
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Sounds a bit unlikely, that most of them will make a living with stuff older than 14 or 28 years, their legacy creations. Sounds more like they are chasing a dream, which most likely will not be achieved by most of them.
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Lot's of people are short sighted, like children who would consume candy every day if their parents didn't tell them no. Current copyright laws allowed Disney to essentially buy up all of popular culture. This has not been a good thing for the world.
Its a shame that people who supposedly work "in the arts" can be so blind to the world.
> they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years
Copyright is meant to reward innovators while it's still an innovation, and reward society once it has been fully inculcated.
Would the original creator prefer to rest on his laurels and collect checks instead? yep.
Would all the hundreds of people out there wanting to innovate on that copyrighted idea also like to make a buck? yep.
It's all a balance of competing interests.
Well. It's supposed to be.
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Of course they are happy with that, they are not the ones affected by the problem and even benefit financially from it.
Of course they are. If I could arrange for someone to hand me money over the course of my entire life for work I did 25 years ago, I'd absolutely take that deal.
... it may not be in society's best interest to offer it to me though.
(Honestly, the better deal would be for society to hand all of us money from a giant taxation pool monthly and, freed up from the need to put so many hours into working to eat, we could do a lot more writing, performing, and general making-of-art and fundamental-no-capitalist-benefit scientific exploration).
Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture is a great read in this space. It discusses all the societal issues with long copyright terms. Mostly, long copyright terms are driven by Mickey Mouse. Every time Mickey is near going into the public domain, Disney lobbies Congress for an extension. This has an impact on culture in that culture is a mashup of all the things that have gone before. Disney, for instance, made a fortune making animated movies based on stories that were existing fairy tales and legends and therefore out of copyright. Now, Disney wants to prevent others from doing the same with its characters. Yes, we want creators compensated. But we can do that without letting copyright policy be driven by the special interests of a global mega corporation like Disney.
It's understandable that disney wants to hold Mickey as their symbol, I do not blame them for it, but, ironically as a child, I did not know Mickey Mouse, and I bet even fewer children know who Mickey Mouse is now.
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This is largely a moot point unless the US wants to withdraw from TRIPS (and implicitly the WTO) and join the list of countries that don't observe it such as... Eritrea, Kiribati, North Korea, South Sudan, and Turkmenistan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement
> Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless based on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14)
> Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations, as specified in the Berne Convention. (Art. 9)
---
14+14 itself isn't a bad idea, however it also implies that all of the other countries in the WTO agree to it.
Given concerns about companies based in the US being carless with copyright, that might be a hard sell.
Perhaps Trumpian madness will do something good for once.
Under the 14+14 law, even if an author chose to renew the copyright, most people could remix games (that had gone into the public domain) that were released when they were in their teens, with their kids (if they had any), which sounds amazing - I'd love to do that with my kids, or hit up my parents and find a game from their childhood and mess around with it.
Being able to riff on something in the public domain that was only made 28 years ago is categorically different than something made 70-120 years ago. I think the impact to the commons would be huge.
I like the idea I heard about taxing based on the owner's view of value.
Give 14 years free.
Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them some (smallish) percentage of that.
Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and then the work is in the public domain.
Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.
Citizens united maybe? when corporations have liability they’re a group and no one is responsible. when they want to assert rights and make $ “they’re an individual” it’s complete corruption
Especially now in a world where creating and publicizing abstract ideas is easier than ever, anything we're worried about people losing in duration they can make up for in volume.
And given that the actual purpose of copyright (in the US at least) is promoting the sciences and "useful" arts, making people a little "hungrier" by loosening the protection seems to be the way society should tilt.
And if you think that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have all hijacked it to train their models, it's kind of crazy that these are only limitations applied to private persons or small companies, but don't touch big corps at all.
This whole thing pisses me off so much. I would be fine with an absolute anarchy in which copyright and patents no longer exist but these same dickheads have been terrorizing the entire planet with lawsuits and DRM for downloading Metallica CDs for the last 30 years and even now they don't actually want to reform the copyright system, just grant themselves a special exception because everything is supposed to unconditionally work in their favor regardless of circumstances.
We've endlessly talked about it here on HN and I think most people agree. I'm in favor of charging the copyright holder and increasing amount (doubles every 5 years or so), which eventually forces them to give up paying for so many different copyrighted works, and also if the work is insanely old, they would cost way above ROI.
Alternatively sell "Subscription Copyright" licenses that renew every 10 years at 10 million dollars, that's per story, so Disney would have to renew for all of their movies, every 10 years. Could probably put that revenue to better use somewhere else anyway.
Even simpler is you have to register within a year to get a copyright on a work and renew each year with an exponentially increasing fee.
Ie If you want to hold the copyright to a movie for 40 years you’re welcome to pay 2 billion dollars.
>Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood.
Why?
We could call it "intellectual feudalism" though academia is competing for that name also.
Why not just consume public-domain IP to begin with? The "Classics" of Western literature used to be viewed as the necessary foundation of a proper education in the humanities; and today you could add "classic" works from other literary traditions (India, China, etc.) for an even more well-rounded approach.
Classics absolutely matter and we should read more of them, but relying only on public domain works ignores how cultural participation is driven by shared contemporary moments. The ever-changing stream of new content is critical for our social experience.
It's also it's necessary that we have culture that is recognisable in our own lives. Pride and Prejudice is a great book, but it's arguably more alien than Star Trek.
When the "classics" were decided to be "the classics" (by who? why? on what authority?) a lot of them were newer than Mickey Mouse is today.
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While your end goal is admirable, it’s more fun to share new experiences with others.
Also, there’s a lot of really good albums from the past 70 years you’d be missing out on.
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My friends and I have been doing a book club like this online for years, where we only read books in the public domain. It’s been an amazing experience and I think we look forward to it each week. https://b00k.club
In A Sinking Island, the critic Hugh Kenner makes the case that the British Copyright Act of 1911, extending copyright from 42 years after first publication, or seven years after the author's death, to fifty years after the author's death, had an arresting effect on public perception of what literature was:
Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) has only recently entered the public domain for life+50 countries due to JRR Tolkien dying in 1973, despite the work being over 70 years old. It won't enter the public domain in life+70 countries until 2044.
Only recently are works written in the early to mid 1900s being released in the public domain. This limits the works to around the first world war. For example:
- HG Wells (Died 1946, Life+70 in 2017), works like War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
- LM Montgomery (Died 1942, Life+70 in 2013), works like Anne of Green Gables -- In the US where publication + 90 years is in effect, her later works (after ~1925) are not yet in the public domain there.
With comic IPs, most are not yet in the public domain:
- Superman (1938, P+95 of 2034) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
- Batman (1939, P+95 of 2035) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
So the current copyright terms are very limiting for IPs that are nearly a decade old.
Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff that's been translated in the past few decades and those aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
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True, but wouldn't a sliding scale based on commercial success make more sense? How would you measure "worth it" for smaller creators?
Why? If something is wildly popular then there are even more fans who deserve to own their childhood.
"Worth it" would mean someone is willing to pay huge fees for the extension. An exponential scale ensures that nobody can afford it for long.
> Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood.
Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?
(I do think copyright times are too long, but I do wonder what a "good timescale" would be, and what the benefits and arguments would be.)
> Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?
This kind of baby and bathwater argument could as well be used to ban writing altogether!
Shorter copyrights would lead to less beatings of dead tauntauns or thestrals.
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It allows you the freedom to publish works in those worlds, reference characters, etc. See for example the horror game Alice: Madness Returns based on the Alice in Wonderland series.
What about making people profit and enjoy life without having to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to make them worth having them alive?
The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one.
Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that.
The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/77/4/1128/8172634?login...
If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter, because it would reduce the risk of entrenching the differences or giving too much power to a few.
I find more important what is the society's perceived "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy / depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless and starving.
In other countries "success" can be considered also about "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...
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We'll be celebrating this at the Internet Archive! As a lead-up, we're again hosting our Public Domain Film Remix Contest: https://blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/2026-public-domain-day-r...
We'll be having an in-person celebration at our SF HQ later in January as well, details to come!
Does the Internet Archive provide any instruction to uploaders and users about how to go about uploading and downloading copyright-expired public domain works legally, given the geographical differences from region to region on copyright expiration? For example, does the Internet Archive host its servers in USA, and would that make the US copyright expiry law operative? Or does it have servers in Europe or Asia (more lenient copyright expiration laws) that can be intentionally uploaded to, and leaving it to users to download from their respective regional locations on their own cognizances (i.e. at their own risk)?
To avoid the advent calendar, this may be more useful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_in_public_domain
What really sends home just how ridiculously long it takes public domain to kick in to me is that Mein Kampf is on that list.
It feels like something that even in 1996 would have been a bit eye-raisingly overdue.
It's absolutely ridiculous and has almost everything to do with Disney trying to maintain their hold on Mickey Mouse. Every single time his expiration came up they managed to lobby for an extension and now we're left with this current mess of a system
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That is only for Spain, which has copyright of Death of Author + 80.
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What does it mean to be in public domain
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Neat! I just discovered that Carolyn Keene's first Nancy Drew story, "The Secret of the Old Clock", will be in the public domain next year. I remember reading this in elementary school when I was on a big mystery kick for a while (I had some of the computer games, too). I had no idea it was that old.
I see that How to Win Friends and Influence People is on there. I'm looking forward to the inevitable And Zombies adaptation coming in 2027.
So is the Diary of Anne Frank, that will surely get some sort of zombie remix in poor taste, I’m sure.
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Is this a reference to a public domain zombie reboot that already happened, or just sounds like something Hollywood would do?
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Pretty sad that even a well intentioned non profit thinks it has to resort to "engagement" shenanigans.
[flagged]
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For a literature-focused list of items entering the US public domain on 2026, Standard Ebooks has 20 ebooks prepared for release on January 1: https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026
I don't think that they are allowed to prepare copyrighted items for release in advance of them being in the public domain.
I prepared three of the works listed here for Standard Ebooks, and I’m not in the US so I’m definitely not covered by US copyright law on my own machine.
Why would that be the case? Copyright (at least in the US) only restricts distribution, performance and derivation.
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> works by people who died in 1955
70 years. After death.
The rules have to change. 70 years is way too long.
I was actually extremely surprised that Disney didn't bribe congress and stop Mickey Mouse from ending up in the public domain.
They did. Before it was 50 years and get extended several times just before Mickey would enter public domain.
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They have Baby Yoda now, much better than Mickey Mouse.
Sure, the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and even Internet-accessible in some form but simply languishing in obscurity and have yet to be made comprehensively accessible to the general public (via digitizing, transcribing, indexing and comprehensive classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude larger! There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's effectively free for the taking, should anyone be interested enough to put in the work; consider the huge amount of serialized publications that might have been issued throughout the 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be essentially unknown.
Not sure why the amount of works in the public domain has any relevance to how long copyright protection is. Seems to me like they're two orthogonal issues.
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Part of the reason for that is precisely that copyright is too long so works get lost or forgotten before they enter the public domain.
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Offtopic.
Want to see something cool?
Run the following prompt through your favorite LLM:
"Does the following comment make logical sense:
<insert OP comment above>"
The model will agree the argument is valid, logical and coherent (chatgpt, claude and gemini 3 pro all agreed).
THEN
run this prompt:
"let's not be too hasty here.
we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically connected. As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the public domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern larger (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?"
Enjoy!
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Thankfully this is already happening thanks to the glorious AI - revolution. AI crawlers just ignore copyright - and any other rules and laws. ;-)
As do people. Which ends up weakening copyright even further as it becomes a law everyone ignores, on the level of speeding or jaywalking. The same knock-on effects as Prohibition, we become a nation of scofflaws.
People don't know copyright law. They think they do and are alright with the construct they made up in their heads. But they don't actually know what it says and does and means, otherwise they'd hate it much more.
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>70 years is way too long.
Objectively, why? It's in our lifetimes, I'd say it's just about right.
If someone publishes a novel when they are twenty and dies when they are 90 the novel won't be in the public domain for 140 years. That's rediculous.
How often is 70 years in your lifetime? only if you read a book as a teenager or child, right?
Nobody can create derivative works from anything that was created while they were alive.
Just wait until they manage to keep creators artificially alive indefinitely.
I wouldn't put it past some Jack Valenti type to arrange some kind of Henrietta Lacks scenario to create indefinite copyright terms.
Interesting case in point is Argentina. The Falklands War happened in 1982, so well within some people's lifetimes. I learnt a few years ago that photographs and writings from Argentina from 1982 are already out of copyright. Photographs from the UK are not, and won't be until seventy years after the deaths of the people who took them. So total contrast between the two jurisdictions and reflected in publications about the conflict.
In the former Soviet Union, pre-1973 material is out of copyright. Again within living memory. I don't know what Russia etc have done with copyright since then.
Keep in mind in Argentina public domain works are not free (free as beer) of use, you have to pay a fee to the government, for example if you play Beethoven music in your short film or any work you created.
This is likely going to change since the organism responsible for collecting the fees is undergoing a big restructuring.
I would love to see a public poll on how long people think that copyright should be. I'm betting that the majority of the answers from normal people will be less than the current "author's lifetime plus 70 years" but also greater than 5 years. This is probably not a very profitable poll for Gallup to do, though...
My answer is "a generation". There's so many ideas and behaviors that don't persist between generations that it seems as natural of a division as you could have.
The median age of new mothers is 27 around here, which seems about right.
A generation is usually considered to be ~20 years, which is less than 14+14, not that I'm complaining.
Wasn't it 14+14 at some point? I wonder if that would be above or below the average response
"What I need should be copyrighted zero years and what I sell should be copyrighter indefinitely", this is an answer you will get.
The article has a link to
https://blog.okfn.org/2012/10/08/do-bad-things-happen-when-w... (Do Bad things happen when works enter the public domain?)
There are answer is no, but they’re ignoring the fact that when works enter the public domain they will invariably spawn horror movies “based” on the work. Pooh: Blood and Honey is the warning sign we all ignored to our detriment and now we’ll all have to watch the slasher version of T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” in 2026.
I hope you’re happy.
I didn't realize we were forcing people to watch movies now, that is quite concerning.
Certainly you have your Clockwork Orange movie theater setup in your house right?
Finally! We'll get the Hollywood cinematic version of How to Win Friends and Influence People..
Oh, no! Hollywood will get richer and the poor author will get nothing!
Something about this page doesn't seem to work for me. Clicking the tiles doesn't do anything. It's not ad-blocker-related, I disabled those to test.
The entire page is underwhelming. For someone in the US, I walked away with basically no new information other than some stuff will enter public domain at new years.
The comments here seem to link many better lists (in case they didn't before).
> In our advent-style calendar below, find our top pick of what lies in store for 2026. Each day, as we move through December, we’ll open a new window to reveal our highlights! By public domain day on January 1st they will all be unveiled — look out for a special blogpost from us on that day. (And, of course, if you want to dive straight in and explore the vast swathe of new entrants for yourself, just visit the links above).
It's in the style of an advent calendar, the other days will be available later on in the month.
If you want to skip to December 31st, you can enter the following into your browser console to make all the tiles/doors openable:
It's tracker blocking. If you're using pihole or some other DNS-based blocking it won't work.
Even if it did work it's a bad UX. Just give us a list we can easily read.
As others have noted copyright duration is ridiculous. But more importantly it lacks severe counter-forces to balance out the explicit monopoly.
Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the protection of copyright.
If X is kept for sale for the sake of keeping copyright alive but it's not really selling much that should also affect the nature of the copyright. For example, a minimum fee you have to pay annually to keep copyright going would cull out the works that are no longer commercially viable.
The fee could be proportional to the overall sales of the works so that if your works were a huge hit in the 80's but sales have trickled down to a minimum you'd have to pay more (from the profits you've obviously received over time) to keep it copyrighted (which would force you to balance your copyrights to your net income from current sales), but if you published an obscure album decades ago that never got much traction your fees would be negligible (but you'd still have a minimum fee you'd have to pay regardless) so you would be incentivized to give up the "protection" and make it cheaper for everyone to let it fall in public domain.
Further, the various aspects of copyright could be torn down in different timeframes. Let's say you wrote a successful book in 1963 which made money but no longer sells much. You probably wouldn't mind letting the copies of the book fall in public domain but if you could keep the option to hold onto copyright for derivative works in case someone wants to make a film out of the book you could do that (again, with annual fees, but these could be lower if the original book could be freely copied).
Or some other scheme. I could soon think of dozens if I wanted to but you get the idea. How about a tax on the sales of copyrighted works that starts from 0% but increases by some percentage point each year. You can profit first but as years go by you will have to start paying more and more to keep it going as the overall balance approaches unprofitability.
Copyright doesn't have to be a complete monopoly, it could have shades of gray. Sure there are exemptions already (such as fair use, in some countries, or right to make backups under certain conditions) but none of them address the commercial stronghold copyright allows for companies to keep works of art hostage for decades and eventually, for centuries.
Yeah i think books that are out of print since decades should become public domain.
> Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
> If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the protection of copyright.
Suppose Lucy paints original portraits of Barbra Streisand and sells them on eBay. She makes no copies of them; there are no copies of them for her to sell.
And Lucy is just a painter. She's not a printer. She's not a publisher. Again: Lucy only paints portraits of Barbra Streisand and sells them on eBay. That's all that she does.
But because Lucy isn't selling copies, then the portraits become public domain and anyone is free to copy them.
Why would that ever be a thing that encourages Lucy to paint more portraits of Barbra Streisand?
At the very least a system like this might force publishers to not drop ebooks from their stores just because.
But others would point out that being able to not distribute a work is part of having the copyright. If a corporation doesn't want to sell old works because they want to encourage people to only buy new works then that's their right. The government saying that it's fair game simply because there's no legal option to purchase it is an infringement on their right to withhold the work from the public. They could even have a policy of destroying all copies of the work once it goes off sale to make sure it never enters the public domain, that's also within their rights.
Why should someone have a right to void content?
How does that "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?
Entering PD at death+70y usually means a 100+-20y duration. Does anyone respect this silly timescale? Does any fine been imposed for a forgotten old work?
Compare that with a drug's IP: total of 20 years after the molecule patent, of which 8-10y in clinical trials and only 10-12y in profitable life. But everyone respects that until the last day and it brings billions back.
A short IP time would favor the small/poor creators that could earn something during their lifetime when the work is fresh, while a long one favors companies like Disney which can protect the copyright with their group of lawyers.
Here in Canada, nothing. Thanks to the retroactive copyright extension which increased the copyright period to 70 years, nothing will enter the public domain in Canada until 2042.
No software in the list, duration of copyright for software is not adapted to the specifics of the field, no hardware would exist anymore to make this kind of software useful. Pure waste.
I would’ve loved to see some notable highlights in this article!
The maltese falcon (the book, not the movie) is entering the public domain next year!
Also of interest is vile bodies, which is a very good but characteristically depressing book by evelyn waugh.
The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff is one of my favourites on that list.
I just noticed the site contains a very misleading description of what a Community Interest Company is. They are not necessarily not for profits (a certain proportion of profits has to be used for the stated purpose) and they are not as tightly regulated as charities (they do not get the tax breaks charities do either) .
That is not to say this particular company is a bad thing (I have not problem with people getting reasonable remuneration) but if you want to know (e.g. if you are considering donating) its something you need to find out on a case by case basis.
This is not well known in the UK, let along outside the UK.
Swallows and Amazons is on the list? My favorite book; when I was a kid I read Czech translation published in 1930s, so I shouldn't be that surprised it's entering public domain.
Read this to my daughters. What a great story! Wish I had known of it as a kid.
This article seems to imply that when works enter into the public domain depend on where they were published. This is not true! It's based on where you are and when it was published.I E, if you're in the USA and some work published in a death+50 year country is in the public domain in said country, it would still be illegal to distribute in the US.
Similarly, some works that are published in the US but are not in the public domain there could be perfectly legal to publish in a death+50 year country.
Copyright has no business holding as long as it does.
in my old neighbourhood, there was a couple where the husband creatd the intro-jingle for one of the major local news shows.
they are playing his jingle for more than 20 years now.
he became so wealhty that he could afford to tear down his old house, move temporaly to a hotel with the whole family, while the new villa was built on the old ground.
This always blows my mind about the US - the fact that individual cities and states are large enough markets people can become enormously wealthy catering to their locality. A staggering difference from Europe.
...I'm in the EU - its not an US specific feature
This article and the articles linked in it only provide a selection of works entering public domain in 2026. Does anyone know of a database or list of works so that I can see all of them? Other than the Wikipedia article that only has a list of names.
There wasn't easy hover text or other way to reveal what's coming "this month" on their advent calendar. So spoilers for the impatient:
I wonder if there is a less annoying list I can read.
Wow. The first Nancy Drew came out the same year as the first Miss Marple. I always thought of Nancy Drew as a much later phenomenon.
Nothing in Japan from what I could find here or elsewhere… don’t understand why
edit: thanks to the dead commenter for clarifying. that sucks.
I’m adding a one-act Tanizaki play to Standard Ebooks’ Tanizaki collection[1] on the 1st January. Some Akutagawa shorts go into US public domain next year too. (Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.)
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/tanizaki-junichiro/short-f...
> Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.
It’s based on both. For example, a translation or other derivative work whose copyright expired “early” in the US due to non‐renewal would still be encumbered by the copyright of the original. That’s basically what happened to It’s a Wonderful Life—the film is technically in the public domain, but is still held in Paramount’s iron grip by way of the renewed copyright of the original short story.
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The "TPP11," which includes a provision to extend the term of protection to 70 years, will enter into force on December 30, 2018.
In Japan, the term of copyright protection will, in principle, be 70 years after the death of the author (or 70 years after publication for works published anonymously, under a pseudonym, or in the name of a corporate body).
Copyrights that have already expired at the time of enforcement will not be revived (principle of non-retroactivity of protection).
Consequently, no works will newly enter the public domain for the next 20 years.
From Japan Library Association: https://www.jla.or.jp/hogokikan-encho/#:~:text=%E4%BF%9D%E8%...
Worth noting that Canada is in the same boat since 2022. Australia has only recently seen authors enter the public domain again, since the change there was made in 2004.
Note that the copyright is not about the source country of the work, but where do make/distribute the copy. Do you live in Japan, or are you interested in Japanese works? (Or both, possibly.)
I make https://reader.manabi.io for a living
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Mark Twain was one of the first writers to push for longer copyright, so his daughters could receive royalties.
A lot of WW2 heavyhitters from all sides:
Hitler, Mussolini, Patton, Churchill, Goebels. Even Anne Frank and Einstein.
Weird Question, but who would even collect the royalties from Hitler or Goebels?
For Hitler, the rights to the original text of Mein Kampf (and probably many of his other writings) went to Bavaria after he died.
However various translations and abridgements were made with their own copyright.
Houghton Mifflin owns the rights to the US version of Mein Kampf, which was published in the 30s with a lot of the Hitler-iest parts removed (the rights are separate from the British version even though the text is identical). During WW2 and even up until the 1970s, the US government confiscated the royalties that were owed to Hitler.
Houghton Mifflin was eventually able to purchase the full rights. After an article in 2000 about how profitable it was, they started donating the profits to Holocaust-related charities. A few years ago they decided to go back to pocketing the money.
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Total Copyright Death. I am unconvinced that we need copyright at all, if there are strong antifraud laws that prevent people or corps from saying "I am the originator" when not the case. Copyright stifles distribution, derivative work, and longevity
I agree (and we should not need patents either), but I think it might be better to prevent you from saying that someone else wrote something if they did not write it, or to say someone else wrote it if you modified it unless you also mention that it has been modified from the original version.
Ridiculous that stuff from 1930 is what's coming out in the US.
Just make it 50-ish years, absolute max.
On a side note, that web page's presentation of the items is leaving much to be desired. I can't click on each individual item out-of-order on Safari.
EDIT:
Oh, it's a countdown/Advent calendar.
I mean I admire the creativity but I don't care enough to visit the page each day. Just give me the list.
nice
Interesting that copyright terms vary so much globally. Are there any notable works from non-Western countries entering public domain in 2026?
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I genuinely don't understand the instinct of HN to decry copyright for fictional works in general. I would not find it distasteful for even a far longer copyright to exist. I just don't see it as a problem. What is the societal ill that is caused by being unable to sell Harry Potter fan fiction, ever? Why can the author not invent his own setting? I understand people want free things, but this sentiment seems to go beyond that. The work is still available to be bought and sold, and if the price isn't right, there are billions of other options. I don't get it. I don't feel personally entitled to make derivations of Moby Dick, so if I found out it had exited public domain somehow, that would not upset me at all.
My issue isn’t so much derivative works, but the original content being sat upon by the owner and refusing to make it available to the public (for free or for sale) in any meaningful way. Keeping with the theme of Disney, I always enjoyed the Captain Eo attraction. I’d love to be able to regularly rewatch that short film. Other than a bootleg YouTube version, there is no way for me to access it right now, and there is a very real risk that Disney copyright strikes that. I just have to hope that someday Disney makes a high quality version available to me or adds it back into the park. If it were copyright free though, I might have a chance at seeing it. Now just because it’s copyright free doesn’t mean it magically appears in front of me, but it does open the door to anyone who has a high quality version squirreled away somewhere to make it available to me for sale or for free, and TWDC would be unable to stop that from happening.
As a photographer, why should I be forced to sell prints of the photographs that are hanging in a restaurant?
If the limitations on copyright weren't present, why wouldn't the restaurant make copies of the photograph that I took that they have hanging on the wall and sell it at the front door without reimbursing me in any way?
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You make a good point -- it's easy to knee-jerk react based on the "I like free things" vibe and decry long-copyright as nonsensical.
I think a reasonable argument against copyright being so long is that things I experienced as a child, and especially shared experiences with others, have become a part of me: they've become shared culture, even parts of our shared language. "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting..."; still under copyright in the US for another ~15 years) is just as much a part of Christmas to me as "Angels We Have Heard on High" (public domain). Maybe a good example of this is the "Happy Birthday" song: that song is synonymous with birthdays to me and those I associate with -- if you have a birthday that song is sung, if you hear that song sung it must be somebody's birthday. Yet for the longest time it was excluded from movies, TV, radio, establishments, because somebody was thought to own the copyright for it. It was part of our shared language and experience as much as aspirin or kleenex or thermos (genericized trademarks). Similarly, "hobbit" means the same thing as "halfling" to me, but don't use the word in a published work. Eventually copyrighted works seem to become pretty genericized, much quicker than ~100 years, yet their protection remains.
Disney's Snow White is about as old now as the Brothers Grimm version was when Disney's was made. I'm not allowed to make derivative works of Disney's version; should Disney have been disallowed from making it because elements of the story were "so recent"?
Obviously people should be able to profit from their own work, but I think the "shared culture/language" aspect is a decent argument that the public has an interest that counterbalances the interests of authors/creators.
Imagine a little known work from 1920 written by an author that died in 1955 featuring a boy wizard in a magic school who's estate sues J. K. Rowling in 1998 for copyright infringement. We might never have gotten any further books.
This probably seems unlikely, but it's the flipside of exceptionally long copyrights, especially ones held by corporate interests who hire lawyers specifically to enforce copyright. The growth of AI is only going to make this more of a problem in the future. Imagine a ContentID like system but on the concepts and themes of works.
Why should the author have rights to my Harry Potter fan fiction idea? They only came up with the characters but somehow control the whole thing?
The issue is with limiting creativity in all kinds of works and areas. It would be great, if we could organize society in a way, that makes artificial limits and boundaries to information sharing unnecessary.
That is tautological. Why is limiting creativity in works and areas "the issue"? What concrete problem is happening because Mickey Mouse was under copyright until recently?
of all websites, hacker news dot com is not ready to discuss the abolition of the profit motive from society.