Novels, music and movies enter public domain on New Year's Day

SANDUSKY — The 1920s were a big decade for American fiction with novels published by classic authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. New Year's Day is "Public Domain Day," the day that another batch of works enters the public domain, meaning that copyrights have expired, and everyone can have access to them. On Jan. 1, works that were first published in 1926 entered the public domain. That means that many ebooks will become available for free at sites such as Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks — books that can be read on ebook readers, tablets and smartphones. Among the books that enter the public domain: "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway, often considered his first important novel; "Winnie-the-Pooh" by A.A. Milne; "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" by Agatha Christie, a classic mystery novel; and "Soldiers' Pay," the first novel published by William Faulkner. Copyright also ends for Dorothy Parker's first poetry collection, "Enough Rope." Many other classic books have entered the public domain in the last few years. For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and Sinclair Lewis' "Arrowsmith" entered the public domain at the beginning of 2021; E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India" went into the public domain in 2020. Classic movies Duke University's Center for the Understanding of the Public Domain reports that quite a few movies will be entering the public domain in 2022. They include "For Heaven's Sake," starring Harold Lloyd; "Battling Butler," starring Buster Keaton; "The Son of the Sheik" with Rudolph Valentino; and "The Temptress," with Greta Garbo. Classic recordings The Duke University center notes that sound recordings are treated differently under copyright law than books. As a result, a whopping 400,000 sound recordings dating from before 1923 enter the public domain, the center emphasized, including "everything from experiments with nascent sound recording technology in the late 1800s to opera, classical music, early blues and jazz, vaudeville, ragtime, popular songs and comedy sketches." Such recordings likely will be found in many places on the internet — public domain means that anyone can distribute them — but the Duke center recommends some good places to try to find them include the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, where people can hear tunes such as "Crazy Blues" by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds and the Library of Congress National Jukebox.