Center for the Study of the Public Domain:

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1960 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2017, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2056 and no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.

What books would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws? You might recognize some of the titles below.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

John Updike, Rabbit, Run

Joy Adamson, Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval: The Age of Roosevelt

Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

Scott O’Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins

John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor

Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique

Dr. Seuss’s Sam-I-Am

The books above are but a fraction of what would be entering the public domain on January 1.

It’s such a shame corporate interests have negated public interests on this issue.