Ten Facts About the Public Domain

Defining the Public Domain

Works may be in the public domain because they:

• Were created before copyright laws (e.g., the Bible)
• Their copyright protection expired (e.g., Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury)
• They never had copyright protection (e.g., federal laws and court decisions, words, names, phrases)
• They were dedicated to the public domain (e.g., europeana).

Public Domain Facts

1. On January 1, 2025 thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 entered the US public domain.
2. These include compositions from 1929 like Singin’ in the Rain, but we only get sound recordings from 1924, like Rhapsody in Blue.
3. This year some of Salvador Dali’s works like Illumined Pleasures, The Accommodations of Desire, and The Great Masturbator enter the US public domain.
4. There’s no complete database of things in the public domain, but there are several resources to help you determine if something is in the public domain and lists of public domain material: a. University of Pennsylvania’s Online Books; b. Cornell’s Public Domain Guide; c. Stanford’s Public Domain Guide; d. The Public Domain Review; e. Duke Law’s Public Domain Day.
5. The benefit of the public domain isn’t just (free) access but the ability to make creative adaptations. What would a modern A Farewell to Arms look like? 
6. The public domain has diminished in recent years. In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, which tacked 20 years onto copyright terms. Works were pulled out of the public domain and put back into copyright for two more decades. Nothing entered the public domain for the next 20 years. For more information, see Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain FAQ.
7. Works solely (no human intervention) generated by AI are in the public domain.
8. Free and open-source software is not in the public domain; software is copyrighted, but the copyright holder grants specific freedoms to the public via a license that encourages broader collaboration and innovation.
9. Observance of a “Public Domain Day” was initially informal; the earliest known mention was in 2004 by Wallace McLean and Lawrence Lessig.
10. This is mostly relevant to African and Asian countries, where works by authors who died in 1974 will enter the public domain this year under the “life plus 50 years” rule.

Celebrate Public Domain Day with us by watching Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou and the Marx Brothers’ The Cocoanuts at Arkadin Cinema and Bar on January 18 at 2:00 p.m. Learn more about the Public Domain Day Film Screening.