Why the year 2019 is so significant
- The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds at our opinion desk.
Public Domain Day—January 1, 2014—gives me an opportunity to reflect on this important asset, mandated by the Constitution of the United States.
Compared with the years before 1998, the public domain has had a relatively small amount of material added to it for a whole generation. Since then, we have been in a catch-up period. Until 1998, the expiration on copyright was the life of the author plus 50 years, and 75 years for a work of corporate authorship/ownership. But here's the complicated bit, so please bear with me: the US Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (CTEA) lengthened that period to the life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation, whichever endpoint is reached earlier. Copyright protection for works published before January 1, 1978 was increased by 20 years to a total of 95 years from their publication date. In practical terms, this means that works published in 1923 should have entered the public domain in 1999. Because of the CTEA, works published in 1923 have to wait until 2019 to enter the public domain. So far, that amounts to 15 years of withholding published works from entering the public domain (with five more years to wait).
There's been a small consolation: unpublished work by authors who died 70 years ago has been entering the public domain. On January 1, 2014, unpublished works (i.e. works never copyrighted) created by people such as composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, director Max Reinhardt, author Kermit Roosevelt, painter Chaim Soutine, philosopher Simone Weil, inventor Nikola Tesla, and actor Conrad Veidt entered the public domain.[1]
Part of the issue with the CTEA was that Congress had been heavily lobbied by the entertainment industry and others to pass the act, since those industries would be the beneficiaries. But what about the public? On that score, remarkably few individuals testified against extending copyright. Congress practically ignored entreaties that the extension of copyright might cause issues.
- ^ With some works the situation can be more complex. Unpublished works that have been copyrighted by an author’s heirs will continue their protection not based on when they were created, but on when they were copyrighted, ensuring that some works will remain in copyright for well over a century, longer than any living human being.