Public Domain Day is Coming!

Next week is one of the best days of the year, “Public Domain Day”!  (Or, occasionally known as “New Year’s Day”.)

Every year on January 1, the copyrights expire on books published decades earlier, putting the works into public domain, meaning that anyone can re-publish the works without paying the author’s estate any royalties.  Hollywood can use an author’s work without permission, usually by taking a famous book and turning it to something that would have killed the author had he not already kicked the bucket seventy years earlier (the minimum length of time that it takes for an author’s copyright to expire).

Actually, the copyright law is a little confusing, but it goes something like this:  A copyright expires 70 years after an author’s death or 95 years after the original publication or 120 years from the date of creation.  This law is subject to change as needed, primarily because every few years Disney begins a cash-rich campaign to bribe politicians to protect the cash cow that surrounds all things Mickey Mouse.  We would all be better off if Congress were half as interested in protecting the Bill of Rights as they are in safe guarding the marketing rights of that obnoxious rodent.

How long to protect intellectual property rights has long been an issue.  Mark Twain was an early champion to extend the period of copyright protection.  So incensed at the large number of pirated copies of his work that he seriously considered giving up writing novels in favor of plays, he lobbied Congress to not only extend the period, but to strictly enforce the laws.  It was partly due to his lobbying that Congress passed laws to recognize international copyrights in 1891, but Twain was unsuccessful at obtaining the extension of copyright protection that he wanted—eternity.  

In 1906, Twain made a dramatic entrance before a Congressional Committee, sweeping away his long dark cloak to reveal his trademark white suit.  Twain stated that a copyright of eternity would be no hardship on the public, since less than a half dozen authors in each century produced works still being read a hundred years later.  Congress did not agree, limiting the period of copyright to 28 years with a single 28-year extension.  (As noted above, that period has since changed.)

Twain accepted the change with his usual humor, stating ““A day will come, when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life.”

For most of Twain’s works, anything published before 1923, the copyright has long since expired.  This means you are absolutely free to write a new novel featuring Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and seek a publisher.  If you were to write a new story featuring a four-fingered squeaky mouse, however, an army of rabid lawyers would chase you to the ends of the earth.

Note.  When Twain died in 1910, he left an astonishing 600 unpublished or unfinished manuscripts.   His will contained instructions that several of these manuscripts could only be published after a specified period of years.  For example, his recently published autobiography could only be published a century after his passing.  The last of these manuscripts cannot be published until 2310.  I can hardly wait.

In 2022, all the books published in 1926 or by authors who died in 1951 will be added to the list of public domain books.  These includes The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather, Soldier’s Pay by William Faulkner, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence.

Along with these books, tens of thousands of sound recordings will enter public domain—more musical recordings than the average person could listen to in the span of a normal life.  In movies, the copyright expires for Rudolph Valentino’s final film The Son of the Sheik and one of the very first movies with sound, Don Juan.

Almost daily, I receive emails trying to sell me cheap copies of wonderful books, the vast majority of which are works of great literature old enough to be in the public domain.  These vultures, masquerading as publishing houses, obtain a used copy of some author’s great work, cut the binding off, and feed the pages through a scanner, obtaining at almost no cost a “new” book to peddle to their unsuspecting customers, promising a digital copy of a ‘best seller’ for the incredibly low price of 99 cents.  They advertise through mass emails, selling no physical products whatsoever.  For all the consumer knows, the entire publishing company is a single obese nerd named Phil living in his grandmother’s basement.

It is rather obvious that I love books, particularly bound books.  But, I also love my Kindle and find it useful to keep reference copies of frequently used books on my Kindle.  So yes, I have copies of most of Twain’s works on my Kindle as well as the writing of Herodotus and the collected letters of Lincoln and so forth.  Instead of giving any of these vulture companies any money, however, I prefer to download my public domain works from Project Gutenberg, a non-profit organization that provides great out of print books free of charge.  If you have never searched through their collection, you can find them here.

Phil and his ilk are comfortably waiting in their basement, watching the calendar until they can swoop down on the literary carcasses of great work, snatching up marketable tidbits without any reward for either the author or the publisher of the editions they copy.  This is all perfectly legal, but it still stinks.  If you’ll pardon me while I switch metaphors, as we say in Texas, a skunk might have got an invite to the picnic, but he still wasn’t welcome when he showed up.

How can you, a casual reader, tell if a digital book is probably “borrowed” from an earlier edition?  If you find an error in a book, it can either be a mistake by the author or a mistake at the publishing house as they set the manuscript into text.  In the first Harry Potter book, J. K. Rowling’s list of necessary school supplies accidentally included “1 wand” twice—an example of an author’s mistake that was corrected in later editions.  

An example of a mistake at the publishing house would include the infamous 1631 ‘Wicked Bible’ where the typesetter accidentally changed Exodus 20 to read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”  (Obviously, that was not a mistake by the author).  Another example would be a recent pasta cookbook that inadvertently advised the reader to season their pasta with “freshly ground black people”.  I would be willing to bet that Autocorrect had something to do with that last example.

Errors are certainly understandable, but if a later edition includes the same typographical error as an earlier publication, that is proof that the publishing company is just stealing the work of someone else.  Even if the work is already in the public domain, that is still morally wrong.

I will make a prediction about the new batch of public domain books coming out soon:   I am willing to bet that by the end of January 2022, one of those fly-by-night basement publishing companies will offer to sell me a copy of Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  While the original volume was typographically flawless as far as I can tell, the most widely available recent edition contains a typo on page 261, where the name Ursula is spelled ‘Ursual’.  Since the earlier editions do not contain this error, it is obviously a typographical error at the publishing house.

How much do you want to bet the cheap e-text versions being peddled next month contain the typo, giving clear proof that Phil never left even bothered to leave the basement just scanned someone else’s work?