Absurd Intellectual

The Center For The Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law reminds us that, until 1978, copyright in the U.S.* only lasted for 28 years, renewable once for a total of 56 years. That means that everything published in 1954 would be entering the public domain this year — yours to cite, remix or mashup, free of charge, and free of fear from pesky lawyers.

And, since something like 85% of all works didn’t get their copyright renewed, it would be open season on tons of works from as recent as 1982, too.

Of course, the copyright law has changed since then — and Americans now get life of the author plus 70 years of copyright protection. (Canadians get something like the life of the author plus 50 years, and every other country has their own little wrinkles.)

Here is a list of some of the works that, when they were created, were expected to fall into the public domain today — but don’t:

• The first two volumes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of Rings trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers
• Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (his own translation/adaptation of the original version in French, En attendant Godot, published in 1952)
• Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim
• Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception
• Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!
• Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O
• Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, subtitled “The influence of comic books on today’s youth”
• Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants
• Alan Le May’s The Searchers
• C.S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy, the fifth volume of The Chronicles of Narnia
• Alice B. Toklas’ The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook

The 1950s were also the peak of popular science fiction writing. 1954 saw the publication of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (filmed three times in the last half century by Hollywood), Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow!, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range, Robert Heinlein’s The Star Beast, and the Hugo Award-winning They’d Rather Be Right by Frank Riley and Mark Clifton. Instead of seeing these enter the public domain in 2011, we will have to wait until 2050 – a date that, itself, seems the stuff of science fiction.

Many, many more are cited in the CSPD post. I find it sad that we’ll have to wait another generation and a half for them to be seized on and re-made by today’s artists.

(via Waxy)

(*U.S. copyright law is difficult enough. Canadian copyright law is in the interminable process of perhaps changing, and I’m basing the info in this post of the CSPD post — I’m not going to delve into cross-border legalities when the point is sufficiently made here.)