Thread by @doctorow

1998's Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended US copyrights by 20 years to life-plus-70 for human authors and 95 years total for corporate authors. The extension was retrospective, so works in the public domain went back into copyright.

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This was a wanton act of violence that doomed much of our culture to disappear entirely before its copyright expired, allowing it to be used and revitalized, rewoven into our cultural fabric.

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It was undertaken to extract extra revenues for the minuscule fraction of works by long-dead authors that were still generating revenues. It also froze the US public domain for two decades, with no work re-entering our public domain until Jan 1 2018.

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That day - the Grand Reopening of the Public Domain - marked the entry of the collected works of 1923 into the public domain. Last Jan saw the liberation of 1924's catalog:

blog.archive.org/2019/12/13/the…

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And now, it's about to happen again. Every year, Duke University's @thepublicdomain and Jennifer Jenkins document the treasures we are about to receive. 1925 is a bumper crop:

web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdom…

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We're getting The Great Gatsby AND Fats Waller; Woolf's Mrs Galloway and Hemingway's In Our Time; we're getting the Harlem Renaissance's peak, and the first year of The New Yorker. It's a good year!

(yeah, Mein Kampf is in there too)

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Here's some highlights from the list:

* John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

* Alain Locke, The New Negro (collecting works from writers including W.E.B. du Bois, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond)

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* Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith

* Agatha Christie, The Secret of Chimneys

* Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves

* The Merry Widow

* Buster Keaton’s Go West

* Always, by Irving Berlin

* Sweet Georgia Brown, by Ben Bernie, Maceo Pinkard & Kenneth Casey

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* Works by ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton, including Shreveport Stomps and Milenberg Joys (with Paul Mares, Walter Melrose, & Leon Roppolo)

* Works by Duke Ellington, including Jig Walk and With You (both with Joseph “Jo” Trent)

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* Works by ‘Fats’ Waller, including Anybody Here Want To Try My Cabbage (with Andrea “Andy” Razaf), Ball and Chain Blues (with Andrea “Andy” Razaf), and Campmeetin’ Stomp

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* Works by Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues,” including Dixie Flyer Blues, Tired of Voting Blues, and Telephone Blues

* Works by Sidney Bechet, including Waltz of Love (with Spencer Williams), Naggin’ at Me (with Rousseau Simmons), and Dreams of To-morrow

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All these works and more will be available at the @internetarchive on Jan 1. Get ready!

eof/