Every year begins with certain literary rituals. The first is to pay homage to Public Domain Day – the acknowledgment of literary works which have passed into the Public Domain and therefore are no longer subject to copyright law. Because copyright terms vary from country to country, one must be careful. In the U.S., for example, the Duke Law School’s Centre for Study of the Public Domain wryly notes: “Once again, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st.” Thanks to the efforts of poor and starving artists like Sonny Bono, nothing new will pass into the U.S. Public Domain until 2019. I’m glad he smashed into a tree. He couldn’t sing anyways.
In the EU, where the term of copyright is the author’s year of death plus 70 years, people are celebrating the entry of works by writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf into the Public Domain because they died in 1941. See here for Project Gutenberg’s list. In Canada, the term of copyright is the author’s year of death plus 50 years, which means we Canucks get to play with works by authors who died in 1961.
This raises an interesting question: what happens if you liberally quote the work of an author whose work has not yet passed into the Public Domain in another jurisdiction? Can the author’s estate sue you if you try to sell your work in that jurisdiction? Perhaps you should err on the side of caution & make sure the authors you “steal” are good and dead first. Like the way Mark Twain made sure of Jane Austen: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
Another annual ritual is the American Dialect Society’s WOTY (Word of the Year) proclamation. This will follow their annual meeting in Portland on the weekend. Anyone can make nominations. See their website for details. While we wait for the announcement, you may want to check out Grant Barrett’s list in the New York Times. As you’d expect, it has a U.S. bias heavily influenced by the Occupy Movement.
The final ritual is more personal – reading resolutions. I didn’t keep any of last year’s reading resolutions, although I made a valiant attempt. This year, I’ll continue to read more at the margins (i.e. indie/local/self-published & non-Western works) & spend less time reading books published by companies owned by companies owned by companies, etc. As an aside, I’d like to read Tristram Shandy. It’s supposed to be the first postmodern novel ever written & I’m curious to know if it deserves that reputation. It has the added bonus of being in the Public Domain no matter what jurisdiction you inhabit, since Laurence Sterne died in 1768.
Photo Credit: James Joyce by Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915 restored.jpg: [Public domain]