Happy Public Domain Day!
January 1, 2024 | Shannon Winton
Happy new year! Or should I say, “Happy Public Domain Day!” because when the ball dropped at midnight, a seasonal miracle happened: thousands of copyrighted works from 1928 entered the public domain. Many people know that Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse were entering public domain, but if you missed the drama surrounding Disney’s longstanding fight to keep copyright, you can check out how they’ve impacted the legislature through the past fifty years or so here.
Even if you’re completely up on the Disney tea, you may not know about some of the best books moving into the public domain this January. So here are a few of the Tomeworks editor picks!
First and foremost, Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf. This fictional biography explores gender differences, love, and infatuation across the spectrum as it follows an Elizabethian England aristocrat, Orlando, through his and her almost-four-hundred-year lifespan. In his mid-30s, Orlando falls comatose after a night of mayhem and civil unrest and wakes up a woman. She continues her life living both as a man, a woman, and without gender with the book ending on its publication day of October 11, 1928.
Another early exploration of crossing the more rigid gender lines of the times and lesbian love is Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. The novel follows a masc-presenting lesbian (or invert as the book designates) in Victorian London. Understood by her father who dies tragically, Stephen is rejected by her self-preserving lover and then the rest of her family. She sets off to London and becomes a successful author. During WWI, she falls in love with a fellow ambulance driver, Mary, and relocates to Paris (a hub for homosexuality at the time). Stephen finds she cannot give Mary what she needs to have a “normal” life and pushes her into the arms of a male friend. Though the book ends sadly and is criticized for the apparent self-hatred Stephen has for her lesbianism, The Well of Loneliness, through both it’s content and the highly scandalous trial for obscenity it inspired, was one of the most easily accessible sources of information on lesbian love in the western world for decades.
D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover also comes into public domain this year. Unable to be widely released at the time of completion, Lawrence privately printed about two thousand copies and distributed them through Europe and the US in 1928. In the book, the young wife of a paraplegic baronet initiates a very steamy romance with their groundskeeper. Though thematically, the book is about holistic love as well as class divides, the erotic and explicit sex led to a number of scandals including the trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 (England) where the book was criticized for, among other things, the recurrent usage of the words “fuck” and “cunt.” The verdict was not guilty.
Not all the IP coming into public domain this year is adult in nature. Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up is also on the list. Though the character of Peter was originally written in a book called The Little White Bird published in England and performed for decades as a play, Peter Pan’s full repertoire didn’t go into public domain in the United States until 2024. For those of you who don’t know the story, Peter Pan is a magical flying boy who has adventures on the island of Neverland with his gang, the Lost Boys, and a family of regular children. (In my not-so-humble opinion, this is the most horrifying book on the list. It’s canon that Wendy and all her female descendants are indentured to play mother to Peter throughout their childhood, only to be forgotten as he takes on the next Darling child and parentifies them. That’s a soapbox for a different blog though.)
Also, although Winnie the Pooh moved into public domain last year, Tigger is now joining him, as his introduction story, The House on Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne is now in the public domain.
Although this is a very short list, you might be asking yourself, what does this have to do with me and my writing? Well, many writers love to write fan fiction, extended universe, and revisionist stories for culturally relevant and formative literature. When the original IP moves into public domain, the opportunity to both write and publish in a beloved world presents itself. Some great examples of successfully marketed derivative works include Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Wicked, and a coffin full of Dracula offshoots. You may not be the kind of writer who likes to play in another author’s sandbox … or maybe it’s something you’re willing to dabble in.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind about copyright if you’re rushing off to write Lady Chatterley’s Venusian Lover or Gorelando: a Biography of Splatter.
Copyright laws are different from country to country. Before you expand your publishing regions on Amazon to other countries, you need to determine if the original IP is still copyrighted in those markets. The good news is that the United States has some of the longest copyright periods in the world so if something is in public domain here, it’s likely in public domain elsewhere. However, best practice is to check and confirm for any market you’re publishing in before you get yourself into any legal hot water.
For books in a series, you can only reproduce or expand upon content, character descriptions, plot points, etc. that are in the books currently in the public domain. So for example, some but not all the books in The Hardy Boys series are part of the public domain. However, if you were planning to write a gritty noir following Joe’s descent into madness after his girlfriend, Iola Morton, dies in a car bomb intended to kill Frank and him, you’d be transgressing on copyright. The book in which Iola is incinerated, Dead on Target, wasn’t published until 1987, is not part of the public domain, and the events are not canon to the larger Hardy Boys universe.
You can sell and copyright any original content you produce based on public domain IP, but you cannot use any other derivative works or characteristics someone else comes up with. For example, Frankenstein’s monster in the original book didn’t have neck bolts. The bolts were added for Boris Karloff’s costume in Universal Pictures’ 1931 movie Frankenstein directed by James Whale. It’s imperative your work doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s intellectual property even if the source material you’re both drawing from is in the public domain.
For the horror movie Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, writer Rhys Frake-Waterfield had this to say about his original vision: “It was unfilmable. I had to literally trash that script and start anew. I had to be really careful about what I was drawing inspiration from. Only the 1926 version is in the public domain, so those were the only elements I could incorporate. Other parts like Poohsticks and Tigger, and Pooh’s red shirt - those aren’t elements I can use because they’re the copyright of Disney and that would get me in a lot of trouble. The first script had a lot of those elements in it, and those elements would have really encroached onto Disney branding and IP.”If you’re interested in publishing anonymously, you still have copyright! However, if you would like to invoke your copyright in a legal battle, you will have to reveal yourself and prove you are the writer of the works. Although many authors work under a pseudonym for traditionally published works, true anonymous publishing occurs most commonly in independently published works on the internet like web serials.
Need more clarity on copyright and public domain issues? You can check out the Copyright Myth Project or watch our own Daphne Strasert’s Writers Lunch webinar Writing in the Public Domain, produced in conjunction with Houston Independent Authors.
Have you written a novel based on a public domain work? Are you looking for an experienced editor to provide detailed feedback, refine your prose, and set you on the course for success? Fill out our interest form today!