Three Famous Poetry Books That Entered the Public Domain in 2019
Three classic poetry collections are now freely (and legally) available online.
January 1st, 2019 was a huge day for public domain works in the United States.
“Public domain” refers to books and other works that aren’t under any form of copyright protection. This can include books that were never copyrighted by their authors, as well as books whose copyright has expired.
In theory, each new year should bring with it a slew of works whose copyright has just expired. In 1998 though, a court case extended copyright protection in the United States by 20 years. This meant that for the past 20 years, no new material entered the public domain through copyright expiration.
Now that the 20 years have passed, we’ve finally “caught up,” and we will start seeing a mass of new works entering the public domain each year. In 2019, work that was published in 1923 is now in the public domain.
This means that thousands of works published in 1923 are now completely free to read, distribute, modify, and more. Duke’s Center for the Study of Public Domain has been doing a great job trying to catalog all the works that are now available. You can see more information here.
