Audio Review: The Steve Cooper Orchestra s CDs Cover the Great American Songbook mdtheatreguide.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mdtheatreguide.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Share This
IDAHO FALLS (KSL.com) New Year’s Day isn’t just the start of 2021, it’s the first day that thousands upon thousands of pieces of artwork, music and literature from 1925 history enter the world of public domain.
If you’re unfamiliar with public domain, it’s a collection of materials that no longer have copyright or intellectual property rights that is now available for the public to expand on. All works from songs to novels to inventions eventually end up there for future generations to build on.
Duke University’s Center for the Study of Public Domain explains it this way: You still have to buy a copy of Homer’s “The Odyssey” but you don’t have to jump through legal hoops to turn ideas from it into new, modern-day pieces, like when the Coen Brothers used it to create the movie “O Brother Where Art Thou?” The most noticeable every-day examples of the public domain can be found in stores when purchasing generic medicines and products.
The Great Gatsby at the London International Antiquarian Book Fair in London in 2013. Image credit: Oli Scarff
Stay tuned in to our local news coverage: Listen to 90.7 WMFE on your FM or HD radio, the WMFE mobile app or your smart speaker say “Alexa, play NPR” and you’ll be connected.
What a year it was for Anglo-American literature and the arts!
1925 was the year of heralded novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, seminal works by Sinclair Lewis, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Agatha Christie, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley … and a banner year for musicians, too. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, among hundreds of others, made important recordings. And 1925 marked the release of canonical movies from silent film comedians Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
The Great Gatsby at the London International Antiquarian Book Fair in London in 2013. Oli Scarff / Getty Images
What a year it was for Anglo-American literature and the arts!
1925 was the year of heralded novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, seminal works by Sinclair Lewis, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Agatha Christie, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley . and a banner year for musicians, too. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, among hundreds of others, made important recordings. And 1925 marked the release of canonical movies from silent film comedians Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
As of today, every single one of those works has entered the public domain. That means that copyright has expired, explains Jennifer Jenkins, a law professor at Duke University who directs its Center for the Study of the Public Domain. And all of the works are free for anyone to use, reuse, build upon for anyone without paying a
January 1, 2021 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1925 are open to all!
On January 1, 2021, copyrighted works from 1925 will enter the US public domain,1 where they will be free for all to use and build upon. These works include books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s
In Our Time, and Franz Kafka’s
The Trial (in the original German), silent films featuring Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and music ranging from the jazz standard
Sweet Georgia Brown to songs by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, W.C. Handy, and Fats Waller.
This is not just the famous last line from