Pooh entered the Public Domain – but Tigger has to wait two more years
January 1 is always Public Domain Day: works that were under copyright on December 31 the previous year, enter the Public Domain on this day. The first day of a new year is always a nice day for people who like open access. January 1, 2022 was a special Public Domain Day. Not only did paintings from artists who died in 1951 become openly available, but so did music recordings by Artur Schnabel, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and books by André Gide and Abanindranath Tagore – all artists who died in 1951. Lists of writers, musicians and other artists who passed away in 1951 were made public in Wikipedia and beyond. In the United States, there were even more celebrations. Due to a 2018 US law (the Music Modernization Act), 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 entered the public domain.