Public Domain Day

Some seventy years after their death in 1940, most of the writings of John Buchan, Mikhail Bulgakov, F Scott Fitzgerald and many others are today released to the public to be used and enjoyed without copyright restrictions.

This truly is their gift to the world. Much as Shakespeare, Conan Doyle, Dickens and others fuel today’s film and TV-makers with ready-made ideas to expand and remix, these authors are now available for all of us to share and build upon.

Their works will also fall into the catalogues of free ebooks. The easy availability of classic titles could be a very compelling reason for many people to invest in these devices, showing another way in which the public domain can drive innovation. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly Amazon and others bring free editions of The 39 Steps, Great Gatsby and others to their customers.

For many of these authors, this means they can finally reach audiences who have been denied access since their books fell out of print. The vast majority of books fall out of print very quickly, and remain out of print during the life of their authors. But copyright laws mean that for a further seventy years we are denied access to these works, unless we can find them through libraries or second hand bookshops.

Many of these have limited relevance by the time they reach the public domain. Their economic usefulness is denied to us while it exists, and their contribution diminished. Their cultural impact, whether high or low brow, is also diminished.

Looking at the literary works released this year, including those by John Buchan and Talbot Mundy (author of a wealth of classic 1920s pulp fiction titles, including King of the Khyber Rifles), we see much that is “popular culture”. It seems very unjust that they only now fall out of copyright, when the culture and politics they were talking about is very changed and their contemporary audiences are either dead or very old.

Yet even authors like Mundy, whose novels are about druids, Romans and Indian mystics, might enjoy a revival. Why not, after all? If there is something in his writing that is entertaining or that sheds light on the way we saw things in the 20s and 30s, we might find time to take a look.

Unfortunately, Bulgakov’s most important book, the Master and Margarita, may not yet be in the public domain, as it waspublished after his death. But he is surely an author in whom we should welcome a revival of interest, as a commentator and satirist of repressive regimes. 

Perhaps the real question is what we do next with these newly available works to make the most of them. People are already transcribing texts and recording audio books; maybe others are performing adaptations; others could be making cartoons or animations. If we value the public domain, we need to be using it, and showing we understand its impact on our creativity.

After all, encroachments on the public domain are still on the table. Sound recordings in Europe are still threatened with an additional twenty years of copyright, on top of the fifty years they currently receive.

The digital era brings us the ability to remix and participate in our culture. We must fulfill this promise both practically, and in the laws we make.