What will enter the public domain in 2026?
(publicdomainreview.org)486 points by herbertl a day ago
486 points by herbertl a day ago
Interesting that copyright terms vary so much globally. Are there any notable works from non-Western countries entering public domain in 2026?
There wasn't easy hover text or other way to reveal what's coming "this month" on their advent calendar. So spoilers for the impatient:
1 William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying
2 Arthur Ransome – Swallows and Amazons
3 Albert Einstein
4 Nan Shepherd – The Weatherhouse
5 Langston Hughes – Not Without Laughter
6 Wallace Stevens
7 Hermann Hesse – Narcissus and Goldmund
8 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film)
9 Barbara Hepworth
10 Evelyn Waugh – Vile Bodies
11 Geoffrey Dennis – The End of the World
12 Charlie Parker
13 Margaret Ayer Barnes – Years of Grace
14 Hellbound Train
15 Hannah Arendt
16 Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities
17 T. S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday
18 Thomas Mann
19 Agatha Christie – The Murder at the Vicarage
20 Franz Kafka – The Castle (English translation)
21 Walker Evans
22 Sigmund Freud – Civilization and Its Discontents
23 Stella Benson – The Far-Away Bride
24 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
25 E. H. Young – Miss Mole
26 P. G. Wodehouse
27 Vladimir Nabokov – The Defense
28 Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon
29 Roger Mais
30 Saadat Hasan Manto
31 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – Insatiabilityin my old neighbourhood, there was a couple where the husband creatd the intro-jingle for one of the major local news shows.
they are playing his jingle for more than 20 years now.
he became so wealhty that he could afford to tear down his old house, move temporaly to a hotel with the whole family, while the new villa was built on the old ground.
This article and the articles linked in it only provide a selection of works entering public domain in 2026. Does anyone know of a database or list of works so that I can see all of them? Other than the Wikipedia article that only has a list of names.
Total Copyright Death. I am unconvinced that we need copyright at all, if there are strong antifraud laws that prevent people or corps from saying "I am the originator" when not the case. Copyright stifles distribution, derivative work, and longevity
I agree (and we should not need patents either), but I think it might be better to prevent you from saying that someone else wrote something if they did not write it, or to say someone else wrote it if you modified it unless you also mention that it has been modified from the original version.
For Hitler, the rights to the original text of Mein Kampf (and probably many of his other writings) went to Bavaria after he died.
However various translations and abridgements were made with their own copyright.
Houghton Mifflin owns the rights to the US version of Mein Kampf, which was published in the 30s with a lot of the Hitler-iest parts removed (the rights are separate from the British version even though the text is identical). During WW2 and even up until the 1970s, the US government confiscated the royalties that were owed to Hitler.
Houghton Mifflin was eventually able to purchase the full rights. After an article in 2000 about how profitable it was, they started donating the profits to Holocaust-related charities. A few years ago they decided to go back to pocketing the money.
> A few years ago they decided to go back to pocketing the money.
The American way *salutes*
Nothing in Japan from what I could find here or elsewhere… don’t understand why
edit: thanks to the dead commenter for clarifying. that sucks.
I’m adding a one-act Tanizaki play to Standard Ebooks’ Tanizaki collection[1] on the 1st January. Some Akutagawa shorts go into US public domain next year too. (Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.)
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/tanizaki-junichiro/short-f...
> Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.
It’s based on both. For example, a translation or other derivative work whose copyright expired “early” in the US due to non‐renewal would still be encumbered by the copyright of the original. That’s basically what happened to It’s a Wonderful Life—the film is technically in the public domain, but is still held in Paramount’s iron grip by way of the renewed copyright of the original short story.
The "TPP11," which includes a provision to extend the term of protection to 70 years, will enter into force on December 30, 2018.
In Japan, the term of copyright protection will, in principle, be 70 years after the death of the author (or 70 years after publication for works published anonymously, under a pseudonym, or in the name of a corporate body).
Copyrights that have already expired at the time of enforcement will not be revived (principle of non-retroactivity of protection).
Consequently, no works will newly enter the public domain for the next 20 years.
From Japan Library Association: https://www.jla.or.jp/hogokikan-encho/#:~:text=%E4%BF%9D%E8%...
Note that the copyright is not about the source country of the work, but where do make/distribute the copy. Do you live in Japan, or are you interested in Japanese works? (Or both, possibly.)
That's NEAT! I live in Japan myself, and I am a passionate Japanese learner (and used to be a teacher too) of multiple decades. Besides, I'm interested in natural language processing and language related technology, and used to study second language acquisition research back in the university. If you ever take part into any tech / language events or meetups, it would be nice to hang out and hear about the development of that app.
Ridiculous that stuff from 1930 is what's coming out in the US.
Just make it 50-ish years, absolute max.
On a side note, that web page's presentation of the items is leaving much to be desired. I can't click on each individual item out-of-order on Safari.
EDIT:
Oh, it's a countdown/Advent calendar.
I mean I admire the creativity but I don't care enough to visit the page each day. Just give me the list.
I genuinely don't understand the instinct of HN to decry copyright for fictional works in general. I would not find it distasteful for even a far longer copyright to exist. I just don't see it as a problem. What is the societal ill that is caused by being unable to sell Harry Potter fan fiction, ever? Why can the author not invent his own setting? I understand people want free things, but this sentiment seems to go beyond that. The work is still available to be bought and sold, and if the price isn't right, there are billions of other options. I don't get it. I don't feel personally entitled to make derivations of Moby Dick, so if I found out it had exited public domain somehow, that would not upset me at all.
My issue isn’t so much derivative works, but the original content being sat upon by the owner and refusing to make it available to the public (for free or for sale) in any meaningful way. Keeping with the theme of Disney, I always enjoyed the Captain Eo attraction. I’d love to be able to regularly rewatch that short film. Other than a bootleg YouTube version, there is no way for me to access it right now, and there is a very real risk that Disney copyright strikes that. I just have to hope that someday Disney makes a high quality version available to me or adds it back into the park. If it were copyright free though, I might have a chance at seeing it. Now just because it’s copyright free doesn’t mean it magically appears in front of me, but it does open the door to anyone who has a high quality version squirreled away somewhere to make it available to me for sale or for free, and TWDC would be unable to stop that from happening.
As a photographer, why should I be forced to sell prints of the photographs that are hanging in a restaurant?
If the limitations on copyright weren't present, why wouldn't the restaurant make copies of the photograph that I took that they have hanging on the wall and sell it at the front door without reimbursing me in any way?
I don’t think copyright shouldn’t exist at all, I think the general consensus in this topic has been that the length of copyright protection is longer than is considered reasonable.
You don’t have to sell the prints if you don’t want to. But if someone else does fulfill that market demand by selling or giving away your photographs after those photographs have entered into public domain, that’s a win for all those who wished to enjoy your art. Without having to visit that particular restaurant. The length of time to get to public domain is the issue at hand.
I want you to make money on your photography. It’s a good incentive to keep doing that scope of work and more art in the world is a win for humanity. But if you haven’t been able to recuperate losses and make profit on a particular photo after 70 years, I don’t think it’s going to happen for ya.
You make a good point -- it's easy to knee-jerk react based on the "I like free things" vibe and decry long-copyright as nonsensical.
I think a reasonable argument against copyright being so long is that things I experienced as a child, and especially shared experiences with others, have become a part of me: they've become shared culture, even parts of our shared language. "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting..."; still under copyright in the US for another ~15 years) is just as much a part of Christmas to me as "Angels We Have Heard on High" (public domain). Maybe a good example of this is the "Happy Birthday" song: that song is synonymous with birthdays to me and those I associate with -- if you have a birthday that song is sung, if you hear that song sung it must be somebody's birthday. Yet for the longest time it was excluded from movies, TV, radio, establishments, because somebody was thought to own the copyright for it. It was part of our shared language and experience as much as aspirin or kleenex or thermos (genericized trademarks). Similarly, "hobbit" means the same thing as "halfling" to me, but don't use the word in a published work. Eventually copyrighted works seem to become pretty genericized, much quicker than ~100 years, yet their protection remains.
Disney's Snow White is about as old now as the Brothers Grimm version was when Disney's was made. I'm not allowed to make derivative works of Disney's version; should Disney have been disallowed from making it because elements of the story were "so recent"?
Obviously people should be able to profit from their own work, but I think the "shared culture/language" aspect is a decent argument that the public has an interest that counterbalances the interests of authors/creators.
Imagine a little known work from 1920 written by an author that died in 1955 featuring a boy wizard in a magic school who's estate sues J. K. Rowling in 1998 for copyright infringement. We might never have gotten any further books.
This probably seems unlikely, but it's the flipside of exceptionally long copyrights, especially ones held by corporate interests who hire lawyers specifically to enforce copyright. The growth of AI is only going to make this more of a problem in the future. Imagine a ContentID like system but on the concepts and themes of works.
Why should the author have rights to my Harry Potter fan fiction idea? They only came up with the characters but somehow control the whole thing?
The issue is with limiting creativity in all kinds of works and areas. It would be great, if we could organize society in a way, that makes artificial limits and boundaries to information sharing unnecessary.
That is tautological. Why is limiting creativity in works and areas "the issue"? What concrete problem is happening because Mickey Mouse was under copyright until recently?
of all websites, hacker news dot com is not ready to discuss the abolition of the profit motive from society.
Swallows and Amazons is on the list? My favorite book; when I was a kid I read Czech translation published in 1930s, so I shouldn't be that surprised it's entering public domain.