Winnie The Pooh & Bambi Officially In The Public Domain

[ZariusTwo]

A deluge of creative works will enter the public domain on Jan. 1. According to US copyright law, anyone will be able to republish or adapt any work published on or before 1926 without needing to pay the author’s estate or even seek their permission.

Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, describes 2022 as “a blockbuster of a year” for public domain enthusiasts. The intellectual law professor has been tracking artistic works entering the public realm and publishes an analysis every December. “It’s like unwrapping hundreds of extra presents during the holidays,” Jenkins writes in an email to Quartz. “Not only do I get to explore all of these incredible works from the past, I get to imagine what creativity they might inspire in the future.”

This year’s bounty includes seminal books like A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Felix Salten’s Bambi, A Life in the Woods, and debut novels by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Dorothy Parker and Langston Hughes’s first compendium of poems also enter in the public domain this year.

In addition, 400,000 sound recordings made before 1923 are also made available to new creators. In the US, a musical composition is treated separately from a recording of a performance. The US granted its first copyrights for sound recordings in 1972, while lyrics and scores have been protected since 1831. A 2018 bill called the “Music Modernization Act” specified a schedule for older recordings to gradually enter the public domain, with the first batch being released in 2022.

https://qz.com/2107498/winnie-the-po...public-domain/