The Creative Commons is celebrating today, January 1st, the:
Every year on New Year’s Day, in fact, due to the expiration of copyright protection terms on works produced by authors who died several decades earlier, thousands of works enter the public domain – that is, their content is no longer owned or controlled by anyone, but it rather becomes a common treasure, available for anyone to freely use for any purpose.
Such works can also become a building block for new creations: people can transform a poem into song lyrics, or make a movie based on a public domain novel (check your local movie theaters to see how often that happens!).
The Government awarded monopoly of Copyright, lasts today for the Lifetime of the creator plus 70 Years. It used to be only 14 years total, back in the 1700’s when the British Parliament was acutely aware of the damage that Monopolies do the the Economy.
Since the Statue of Anne, in 1710, it was clarified that at the expiration of the Copyright Monopoly, the works that were constrained by the Monopoly, get to be returned to the Public Domain, where permissions are no longer necessary for the distribution, replication and modification of those works of art.
Celebrate the Cultural Heritage from which the Culture of Tomorrow can be created:
Happy Public Domain Day !