It’s not only books: copyright in the US is also expiring on a host of films, paintings and music. “The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we’re reaching the 20-year thaw,” the center’s director Jennifer Jenkins told the Smithsonian. The magazine predicted that the release’s impact on culture and creativity could be huge, because “we have never seen such a mass entry into the public domain in the digital age”. That novel, alongside thousands of other books, will become part of the repository of texts on sites such as the Internet Archive and Google Books. Students will be able to quote freely from it; theatre producers will be able to adapt it.

Source: The Guardian January 02, 2019 14:37 UTC