Why celebrate the public domain? When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. - Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain
Another year dawns... and another bevy of works dust off their copyright and emerge fresh-faced, full of hope, into the elysian plains of the public domain! On this year's Public Domain Day (which falls each January 1st) we welcome, in lots of countries around the world, the works of two titans of 20th-century art, Frida Kahlo and Henri Matisse, and in the US a handful of seminal books including William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. - Happy Public Domain Day 2025!
