The copyright clock keeps ticking

This is the second day of January and, for many Americans, the first work day of 2024.

For The Legal Genealogist, it’s the second day of 1928.

No, that’s not a typo. I really do mean 1928.

The year that books like D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front were all published for the first time.¹

The year that “Mack the Knife” and “Makin’ Whoopee!” were first available as sheet music.²

And — sigh — the year that this blankety-blank-blank pesky film was first released to the public:

Yeah, that’s Disney’s Steamboat Willie. And I’m embedding the clip here and spreading it as far and as wide as I can today. Simply because I can.

Because, as of the second the clock ticked over to 2024, that film and everything else legally published in the United States at any time in the year 1928 — thousands and thousands of books, sheet music, films, photos and more — entered the public domain.

A whole year’s worth of materials, wonderfully free for all of us to use in our research, our blogs, our presentations, our publications without having to try to find the copyright owner and secure permission. Remember, that’s what public domain means: when copyright expires and a work goes into the public domain, we’re allowed to use it freely, any way we want, for any purpose (with some limits³), without needing permission from or payment to the creator of the work.⁴

This really is A Very Big Deal — and it really shouldn’t have been one.

Because of the way the copyright law works, providing protection only for a set number of years, a number of copyrights should have expired every year and we should have been getting a whole year’s worth of materials released into the public domain every year. But that copyright clock stopped ticking in 1998.

There’s a whole long backstory as to why it stopped ticking, and it was all because of that blankety-blank-blank pesky film. The Disney people didn’t want Steamboat Willie — the film where Mickey Mouse made his debut — to become public domain. So it lobbied to get the copyright statute changed to add 20 years of protection to all then-copyrighted works. The amended law provided that the copyright clock would stop, dead, on anything then-copyrighted and wouldn’t start to run again until 12:00.01 a.m. 1 January 2019.⁵

At that point, the statute said, after those additional 20 years, for most things, the clock would start moving again and, as it ticked over into 2019, the law said we should get an entire year’s worth of published works — everything legally published in the United States during 1923 — transferred into the public domain.⁶

Of course, since copyright law is a matter of statute, and any statute can always be amended, at any time up until midnight on 31 December 2018 — “the end of the calendar year in which (copyrights) would otherwise expire” — Congress could still have bollixed this up. So, as 2018 drew to a close, all of us who watch copyright issues held our collective breath.

And — somehow, astonishingly — Congress didn’t manage to foul it up. On 1 January 2019, thousands and thousands of items passed from copyright-protected status into the public domain. And we could all then say that the public domain included “everything legally published in the United States before 1924” (instead of the “before 1923” we’d been saying for 20 years).⁷

And then we started worrying. Because, of course, since copyright law is a matter of statute, and any statute can always be amended…⁸ Yeah, as of 1 January 2020, we were supposed to get another year’s worth of goodies. But — ulp — Congress could still foul it up.

Amazingly enough, as that year drew to an end, the clock kept right on ticking and, as of 1 January 2020, we began saying that copyright had expired for works published before 1925. Then, as of 1 January 2021, we began saying that copyright had expired for works published before 1926. And as of 1 January 2022, we began saying that copyright had expired for works published before 1927. And as of 1 January 2023, we began saying that copyright had expired for works published before 1928.

And — may miracles never cease — Congress didn’t manage to foul it up last year either. In copyright terms, 1928 finally got here. As of 1 January 2024, we can now say that copyright has expired for works published before 1929. And on 1 January 2025, we can include works published before 1930. And so on.⁹

For now, at least, that copyright clock is still ticking…

Welcome to 1928 — and the wealth of now-out-of-copyright materials produced that year.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Welcome to 1928!,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 2 Jan 2024).

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