Let's Hear It for PD!

The world may end in 2012, according to the Mayan long-count calendar and George Lucas. But book publishers are nervous about 2019... the year of great copyright change.

Most books you read (unless you're devoted to Dickens or Wharton) were published in the last ninety years, I imagine. Probably after 1923. Everything published before 1923 in the U.S. is public domain. So you can post it on your blog, tweet entire chapters from it, give dramatic readings at cocktail parties. But everything 1923 and after is... dun dun dun... copyrighted! (More or less, if copyright was renewed. But that's a whole messy can of money-hungry worms.) F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920) is PD; The Great Gatsby (1925) is not. This works with films, too: Do whatever you want with The Birth of a Nation (1915), but hands off Gone with the Wind (1939).

As the twentieth century rolls along, copyright law gets more and more confusing. But works from 1923 until 1977 are PD after 95 years. Once their near-century is up, we can sell bootleg copies in the streets for profit. So all those books published within 1923 will cling to 2018 desperately, then bam! Up for grabs on New Year's Day.

Let's say that Disney doesn't try to renew rights to Mickey Mouse. Let's say the 95-year rule sticks. What literary gems will the copyright tidal wave release in 2019?

Honestly, not much. Willa Cather's estate might shed a tear for A Lost Lady, which will become PD. Then in 2020, all we'll really get is E.M. Forster's A Passage to India.

But 2021 is when the floodgates really start to open. Download your free e-books of An American Tragedy, Mrs. Dalloway, Manhattan Transfer, and The Great Gatsby. And soon it's on to The Sun Also Rises, Elmer Gantry, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and To the Lighthouse.

Yes, folks, it's time to plan your Oscar-winning adaptations of these classics. (Unless Baz Luhrmann gets there first.) Just keep the PD on the DL around Mickey.