If your New Year’s resolution was to translate Rilke’s Duino Elegies into English, you’re in luck. The German original is one of thousands of works that entered the public domain Jan. 1, along with Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and Robert Frost’s New Hampshire, the collection in which “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” first appeared.
Entering the public domain means a work is free to be reprinted, adapted for the screen, recorded as an audiobook, or rewritten as a parody (unless, as in Gibran’s case, the original is already beyond parody). The author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, who achieved an improbable bestseller in 2009 with his literary spoof, can now follow it up with Tarzan and the Golden Lion and Goblins or Wolfman versus the Inimitable Jeeves.
There hasn’t been a copyright jubilee like this in two decades. The 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act put a freeze on expirations by adding 20 years to the protection period for works published in 1923, from 75 years to 95 years. The U.S. has some of the longest-lasting copyright protections in the world, not because we esteem our artists so highly but because of a very special mouse.
The Walt Disney Company, in order to protect its mascot, has successfully lobbied Congress for extension after extension since the late 1970s, and everyone else’s favorite classic books have been caught up in Mickey’s wake. It is odd to think of beloved characters like Anne of Green Gables and Hercule Poirot being held captive by a squeaky-voiced mouse. It’s a funny image — which soon you will be free to draw, provided you only use details from the mouse’s earliest incarnation. Barring action from Congress, works from 1928 will finally enter the public domain five years from now, among them “Steamboat Willie.”
