Something About 2021

Happy New Year!

Congratulations, you've made it to 2021. Here's to your health and happiness and knowing 2020 is finally hindsight. I've wanted to crack that one for nearly three-hundred and sixty-some-odd days.

It's Public Domain Day for work published or created 70 years after the creator's death, if it was published during the creator's lifetime. This legal transition of copyright works into the public domain usually happens every year on January 1 based on the individual copyright laws of each country. Under the Copyright Term Extension Act, books published in 1925, films released in 1925, and other works published in 1925, will enter the public domain this year. So welcome to the following, among many others: 

• George Orwell (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four)
• George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion, Saint Joan)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
• The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney (Universal Pictures)
• The Pleasure Garden, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
• Wizard of Oz, starring Dorothy Dwan

The Bellairs Corpus looks to hit the public domain around 2061, but whoever runs Bellairsia can then provide the details.