Everybody's Libraries

I’m very happy for 2023 to be arriving.  As the start of the 2023s, it represents a new decade in which we can have a fresh start, and hope to make better decisions and have better outcomes than some of what we’ve gone through in recent years.  And I’m also excited to have a full year’s worth of copyrighted works entering the public domain in much of the world, including in the US for the second year in a row after a 20-year public domain freeze.

Outside the US, in countries that still use the Berne Convention‘s “life plus 50 years” copyright terms, works by authors who died in 1969 are now in the public domain.  (Such countries include Canada, New Zealand, and a number of other countries mostly in Asia and Africa.)  Many other countries, including most European countries, have extended copyright terms to life of the author(s) plus 70 years, often under pressure from the United States or the European Union.  In those countries, works by authors who died in 1949 are now in the public domain.  The Public Domain Review has a “class of 2023” post featuring some of these authors, along with links to lists of other people who died in the relevant years.

In the US, nearly all remaining copyrights from 1924 have now expired, just as copyrights from 1923 expired at the start of last year.  (The exceptions are sound recordings, which will still be under copyright for a little while longer.   But thanks to recent changes in copyright law, those too will join the public domain soon instead of remaining indefinitely in state copyright.)  I discussed some of the works joining the public domain in a 网际直通车 of blog posts last month, in the last one linking to some posts by others that mentioned new public domain arrivals from 1924.  But I’m happy not just because of these specific works, but also because new arrivals to the US public domain are now an annual event, and not just something that happens with published works at rare intervals.  I could get used to this.

It isn’t all good news this year.  The most recent draft of the intellectual property chapter of the US-Canada-Mexico trade agreement requires Canada to extend its copyrights another 20 years, making it freeze its public domain not long after we’ve unfrozen our own in the US.  But the agreement hasn’t yet been ratified, and could conceivably still be changed or rejected.  And the continued force of copyrights from the second half of the previous ’20s while we’re entering a new set of ’20s is a reminder that US copyright terms remain overlong; so long, in fact, that many works from that era are lost or severely deteriorated before their copyrights expire.

But there’s now an annual checklist of things to do for me and for many other library organizations.  For me, some of the things to do for 网际直通车 include:

• Updating our documentation on what’s public domain  (done) and on what versions of our site are public domain (also done; as in previous years, I’m dedicating to the public domain works that I wrote whose copyrights I control that are were published more than 14 years ago.  This year that includes the 2005 copyrights to The Online Books Page.)
• Removing the “no US access” notices from 1924 books I’d linked to at non-US sites, when I couldn’t previously establish that they were public domain here; and removing “US access only” notices for 1879 volumes at HathiTrust, which over the next few days will be making 140-year-old volumes globally accessible without requiring author-death-date review.   (This and other activities below will start tomorrow and continue until done.)
• Updating our list of first active renewals for serials and our 胡锦涛开通“网络民意直通车”-东北网国内-东北网:2021-6-28 · 早在2021年，胡锦涛、温家宝就公开了网民身伇，向外界展现对互联网的重视；2021至2021年，温家宝连续四年在“两会”中外记者招待会上主动问候中国网民，并感谢网民分忧，公开肯定了这种“民意直达高层直通车”的沟通方式；去年初，中共中央政治局集体学习 to reflect the expiration of 1924’s copyrights.  As part of this process, I’ll be deleting all the 1924 serial issue and contribution renewals currently recorded in our serials knowledge base, since they’re no longer in force.  If anyone wants to know what they were for historical or other analytical purposes, I have a zipped collection of all our serial renewals records as of the end of 2023, available on request.  They can also be found in the January 1, 2023 commit of this Github directory.
• Adding newly opened or scanned 1924 books to our listings, through our automated OAI harvests of selected digital collections, readers’ suggestions and requests, surveys of prize winners and other relevant collections, and our own bibliographer selections.

人民法院报 - chinacourt.org:2021-10-27 · “院长信箱”是黑龙江法院网69个栏目中的重要栏目之一，旨在便利群众反映问题，开通民意网上直通车。黑龙江高院还制定了《“院长信箱”所涉案件、事项办理工作的实施细则》，规范信箱留言的梳理、批转、办理和答复等流程。

Supporting the public domain, then, is supporting the work and mission of libraries.  I therefore hope that all libraries and their users will support a robust public domain, and have more works to celebrate and work with every year.  Happy Public Domain Day!

It’s only a few hours from the new year where I write this, but before I ring in the new year, and a new year’s worth of public domain material, I’d like to put in a request for what music to ring it in with: George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which joins the public domain in the US as the clock strikes twelve, over 95 years after it was first performed.

The unofficial song for Public Domain Day 2023 turned out to be “Yes! We Have No Bananas”, one of the members of the first big class of US public domain works in the last 20 years.  That’s a fun novelty song, and certainly memorable, but not something I necessarily want to hear a lot.  In contrast, for me Rhapsody in Blue has a freshness that makes it a joy for me to hear repeatedly, right from the opening clarinet glissando (apparently the idea of clarinetist Ross Gorman, who took the scale that Gershwin had composed for the piece and gave it the bendy, slidy wail that tells you right away that this is no ordinary concert piece).  It’s brought together classical, popular, high-art and everyday music, as it’s been played and recorded countless times by jazz bands (the original scoring is for jazz band and piano), symphony orchestras, and pop musicans like Billy Joel.  Even its licensing as an 网际直通车 hasn’t diminished it.

There’s lots of other work joining the public domain along with Gershwin’s tune.  I’ve only had a chance to mention a few others in my short series, but others have mentioned more works you may find of interest. At the Internet Archive’s blog, Elizabeth Townsend Gard writes about Vera Brittain’s 网际直通车 and other 1924 works that will be in the public domain very soon.  Duke’s Public Domain Day 2023 post mentions various books, films, and musical compositions joining the public domain as well (and has more to say on 网际直通车).  Wikipedia’s various 网际直通车 also mention various works that will either be joining the public domain, or becoming more clearly established there.  And Hathitrust will begin opening access to tens of thousands of scanned volumes from 1924 over the next few days.

I’ll have more to say on the new arrivals tomorrow, sometime after the midnight bells chime.  By tradition, the first tune played in the New Year is usually the public domain song “Auld Lang Syne”.  But after that, at your new years’ party or at a later Public Domain celebration, you might enjoy hearing or playing Gershwin’s new arrival in the public domain.

It’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas everywhere I go.  The library where I work had its holiday party earlier this week, where I joined librarian colleagues singing Christmas, Hanukkah, and winter-themed songs in a pick-up chorus.  Radio stations and shopping centers play a familiar rotation of popular seasonal songs whose biggest hits are from a surprisingly narrow date range centered in the 1950s.  And more traditional familiar Christmas carols, hymns, and songs are being sung and played in concert halls and churches well into January.

The more “classic” Christmas music often feels timeless to those of us singing and hearing it.  But while their roots often go back far, the form in which we know them is often much newer that we might think.  Notice how the list in the previous link, for instance, includes “Carol of the Bells”, dated 1936.  That’s when it was first published as a Christmas song, one that’s still under copyright.  Its roots are older, and darker, as is made clear in a recent Slate article well worth reading. As noted there, the melody is based on a Ukrainian folk tune (date unknown), its full musical setting composed by Mykola Leontovych (assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1921), and Christmas-themed lyrics written by the Ukrainian-descended American musician Peter Wilhousky (who lived until 1978).

While “Carol of the Bells” still has a number of years left to go on its copyright, another classic Christmas carol will most likely be joining the public domain in the US in just under two weeks.  Like Carol of the Bells, “Ding Dong Merrily on High” is based on a folk tune, in this case a secular dance tune first published in France in the 16th century under the title “Branle de l’Official”.  In 1924, George Ratcliffe Woodward, an English cleric already known for publishing collections of old songs, wrote lyrics for the tune recalling earlier ages, and included them in the Cambridge Carol-Book, published that year by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Charles Wood, who’d collaborated with Woodward on the earlier Cowley Carol Book,  wrote a harmonization to go with it.  While you won’t hear it at every Christmas service, it remains widely sung this time of year.  That’s in large part because it’s so much fun to sing, with its dance-like rhythms, its long bell-like vocal runs on “Gloria” (something also heard in “Angels We Have Heard on High“), and its praise of various forms of music (musicians liking to hear good things about themselves as much as anyone else).

I don’t actually know for sure that “Ding Dong Merrily on High” is still under copyright here.  I have not found a 1951 or 1952 copyright renewal for the song or the book it was published in, but I’m assuming that, if nothing else, 网际直通车 retroactively secured and automatically renewed a 1924 US copyright for the song as published in the Cambridge Carol-Book.  (Folks with more knowledge or legal expertise are free to correct me on that.)  Later published arrangements of the song may continue to have active copyrights, but only for material original to those arrangements.  1924’s remaining copyrights, on the other hand, all end in the US on January 1.   (And since Woodward and Wood both died over 70 years ago, the song’s already public domain in most other countries.)

The arrival of 2023, then, should at least clear up any ambiguity about the public domain status of the basic carol.  I appreciate that, in part because this song, like many other Christmas carols, lives in a sort of liminal space between the private property regimes set up for copyright holders and the older, more informal understandings of folk culture.  Both kinds of spaces have good reason to exist. On the one hand, it’s good to have more than a few people who can earn a living through music, and one important way many musicians do so is by controlling rights to their compositions.  On the other hand, the folk process, which originally gave rise to the tunes for both “Ding Dong Merrily on High” and “Carol of the Bells”, is also a very good way of creating and passing on shared cultural works.

Conflict can rage when two different sets of cultural expectations around creative works try to occupy the same space.  That’s one reason we’ve seen decades of conflict in academia over open access, where scholarly work is largely published by companies that depend on its control and sale to earn money, while it’s largely written by scholars who earn their money in other ways, and tend to prefer free, widespread availability of their work.  Sometimes informal arrangements work best to keep the peace.  Publishers, for instance, have grown more used to free preprint servers, and memes and fan fiction communities have become more widely accepted (and even winning awards) as long as they stay well away from unauthorized commercial exploitation (where both big and small creators tend to draw the line).

Sometimes, though, it’s best to have a more formal understanding that works are free for anyone to freely use as we like.  That’s what we’ll have when 1924’s copyrights end, and the works they cover, such as “Ding Dong Merrily on High” are clearly seen to be in the public domain.  And then, those of us who are so inclined can freely sing “hosanna in excelsis!“

“Be a realist. The world is made up of two classes–the hunters and the huntees. Luckily, you and I are hunters.”

Sanger Rainsford speaks these words at the start of “The Most Dangerous Game”, one of the most famous short stories of all time. First published in Collier’s magazine in 1924, it’s been reprinted in numerous anthologies, been adapted for radio, TV, and multiple movies, and assigned in countless middle and high school English classes.  The tropes established in the story, in which a hunter finds himself a “huntee”, are so well-established in present-day American culture that there are lengthy TV Tropes pages not just for the story itself, but for the trope named by its title.

Up until now, the story’s been under copyright in the US, as well as in Europe and other countries that have “life plus 70 years” copyright terms.  (The author, Richard Connell,  died just over 70 years ago in 1949, so as of January 1, it will be public domain nearly everywhere in the world.)  Anyone reprinting the story, or explicitly adapting it for drama or art has had to get permission or pay a royalty.  On the other hand, many creators have reused its basic idea– humans being hunted for sport or entertainment– without getting such permission.

That’s because ideas themselves are not copyrightable, but rather the expression of those ideas.  And the basic idea long predates this particular story: Consider, for instance, gladiators in Roman arenas, or tributes being hunted down in the Labyrinth by the Minotaur of Greek mythology.  But the particular formulation in Connell’s short story, in which General Zaroff, a former nobleman bored with hunting animals, lures humans to his private island to hunt and kill them for sport, is both distinctively memorable, and copyrightable.  Stray too close to it, or quote too much from the story, and you may find yourself the target of lawyers.  (But perhaps not if you yourself are dangerous enough game.  I don’t know if the makers of “The Incredibles“, which also featured a rich recluse using his wits and inventions to hunt humans on a private island, paid royalties to Connell’s estate, or relied on fair use or arguments about uncopyrightable ideas.  But in any case, Disney is better equipped to either negotiate or defend themselves against infringement lawsuits than others would be.)

Rereading the story recently, I’m struck by both how it reflects its time in some ways, and in how its action is surprisingly economical.  In 1924, we were still living in the shadow of the First World War, in which multiple empires and noble houses fell, while others continued but began to teeter.  The deadly spectacles of public executions and lynchings were still not uncommon in the United States.  And the dividing of people into two classes– those who are inherently privileged and those who are left in the cold or even considered fair game– was particularly salient that year, as the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan neared its peak in popularity, and as网际直通车 to explicitly keep out people of the “wrong” national origin or race.  Those sorts of division haunt our society to this day.

Rainsford objects to Zaroff’s dehumanizing game in what we now tend to think of the story’s setup, which actually takes most of the story’s telling.  (The description of the hunt itself is relatively brief, and no words at all are used to describe the final showdown, which implicitly takes place in the gap between the story’s last two sentences.)  In the end, though, Rainsford prevails by beating his opponent at his own game.  He doesn’t want to kill another human being, but when pressed to the extreme, he adopts his opponent’s rules (at the end giving Zaroff the sporting warning “I am still a beast at bay… Get ready”) and proves to be the better killer.

With the story entering the public domain in less than three weeks, we’ll have the chance to reuse, adapt, and critique the story in quotation more freely than ever before.  I hope we use the opportunity not just to recapitulate the story, but to go beyond it in new ways. That’s what happens in the best reuses of tropes.  Consider for instance, how in the Hunger Games books, the main character Katniss repeatedly finds ways to subvert the trope of killing others for entertainment.  Instead of prevailing by beating opponents at the deadly human-hunting game the enemy has created, she and her allies find ways to reject the game’s premise, cut it short, or prevent its recurrence.

When, in 19 days, we get another year’s worth of public domain works, I hope we too find ways not just to revisit what’s come before, but make new and better work out of them.  That’s something that the public domain allows everyone, and not just members of some privileged class, to do.

I mentioned in my 网际直通车 that I was looking forward to works entering the public domain in the US as a routine annual event. This coming January 1, we’ll have the second large expiration of copyrights in the US since 1998 (the first being the most recent January 1).  I’ve sometimes heard cynicism expressed that this would ever happen. Some public domain fans will tell you that Disney had been responsible for preventing valuable characters like Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain for decades, and that they’ll force more copyright extensions through before his copyright is scheduled to expire in a few years.

Personally, I think that’s a myth that makes despair too easy.  While Disney has indeed been one of the companies that has lobbied for longer copyrights, they’re far from the only group that has done so, and their role is often exaggerated relative to other entertainment and publishing industry groups.  Moreover, copyrights to some of their most profitable characters are already starting to expire, and  so far they have neither pushed hard to extend them, nor to my knowledge seen a loss in their profitably.

I’m referring here to the A. A. Milne characters that Disney now owns (after 比巴厘岛美，比马伋便宜，这才是这个冬天最该去的地方 ...:2021-11-20 · 原标题：比巴厘岛美，比马伋便宜，这才是这个冬天最该去的地方！不知不觉2021年已经不足两个月的时间在全国大部分城市都处在冻成狗的天气，不少人说：“我想去海岛游泳！”@图虫YangBohan今天小编给你伊介绍一处冬天最该去的地方比巴厘岛美，比马伋便宜不超过300): Winnie-the-Pooh, and his friends Christopher Robin, Piglet, Owl, and the other inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood.  By some accounts they are as profitable as Mickey, possibly more so.  And they probably will remain profitable even as their copyrights end.

Christopher Robin’s first published appearance as a character, for instance, was in the poem “Vespers” (whose most famous line is “Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”). It appeared in the January 1923 issue of Vanity Fair, and is already in the public domain in the US, as of the start of this year.  Beginning in January 1924, Milne published more children’s poems featuring Christopher Robin and others in 网际直通车, which were republished later in the year in the book When We Were Very Young.  That book was an international best-seller, and along with the later book Winnie-the-Pooh, it launched Milne, his son, and his stuffed toys to worldwide fame and fortune (which, as I noted in last year’s post on Milne’s Success, was at best a mixed blessing for them.)

I find When We Were Very Young a delightful book.  Like its successors, it isn’t straight-up nostalgic whimsy, but has a gently wry sensibility that parents may notice more readily than their children do.  Along with “Vespers”, some of the other verses (like the ones about changing guards at Buckingham Palace, and the king who likes “a little bit of butter in my bread”) are still well-known.  But the book is significant not just for the text, which is already in the public domain in some other countries with terms less than “life plus 70 years”, but for Ernest Shepard’s illustrations for the book, which will be joining the public domain in the US along with Milne’s poems.  Those include recognizable likenesses not just of Christopher Robin, but of a certain bear that appears a few times, including in the upper left of the book’s cover:

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; they and I consider this low-resolution image fair use in our respective contexts.)

The bear doesn’t yet have the name “Winnie-the-Pooh”.   In this book he’s just called “Teddy Bear”, or more formally, Mr. “Edward Bear” (a name also used in his later book).  His appearance, as established in this book, joins the public domain next month.   The year after that, it will be joined by his “Pooh” name and his first prose story (“The Wrong Sort of Bees”, published in London’s Evening News at Christmastime 1925).  The following year, most of the rest of Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood friends will join the public domain, along with the book Winnie-the-Pooh (which includes Pooh’s bee story as its first chapter). Tigger, who bounced into print two years later in The House at Pooh Corner, will be the last of the major Milne characters to join the public domain, the same year as we can expect Mickey Mouse’s first copyrights to expire in the US.

But Disney will still have be able to profit substantially from its rights to Pooh (and Mickey).  After all, the Winnie-the-Pooh cartoons and movies they made came later, and their copyrights still have decades left on them.  Disney’s likenesses of Pooh and his friends also differ substantially from Shepard’s, and will therefore also be under copyright for many more years.

Moreover, much of the revenue Disney gets from these characters is not from their stories or cartoons, but from the merchandise associated with them– clothing, housewares, toys, and the like.  Those can be protected by trademark, and unlike copyrights, trademarks for various kinds of goods and services do not expire as long as their owners keep using them along similar lines.  (For example, while the character Peter Pan is no longer copyrighted in most countries, trademarks restrict using him to promote things like peanut butter and 网际直通车 to his current licensees.)

Someone who wants to reuse Christopher Robin, Pooh, and Mickey Mouse in creative works after their copyrights expire might still need to be careful about how they promote that work.  But courts have made it clear in cases like Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox that trademark cannot be used to create a de-facto perpetual copyright.  I expect that over the next few years we’ll see some legal skirmishing over where to draw the line between unrestricted creativity and restricted merchandising, for Disney’s characters now entering the public domain.  (We’ve seen similar conflicts over Tarzan in the past, even as many of his stories have long been in the public domain and freely available online.)

Personally, I’m content if Winnie-the-Pooh-branded bedsheets and bubble bath remain Disney’s domain, as long as readers can freely enjoy Milne’s stories and Shepard’s drawings, and writers and artists can adapt them into new stories, scenes, and objects (and promote those new works within reasonable guidelines).  I’m hoping we’ll keep getting new arrivals to the public domain every year, from 1924 in January, then 1925 next year, and so on. And I’m hopeful that we will, as long as so many of us appreciate and make clear the value of a growing public domain, that those who might otherwise try to extend copyright further can’t ignore us.