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The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living.
I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.
I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?
So many ideas better than the current regime.
> Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects.
An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.
Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture is a great read in this space. It discusses all the societal issues with long copyright terms. Mostly, long copyright terms are driven by Mickey Mouse. Every time Mickey is near going into the public domain, Disney lobbies Congress for an extension. This has an impact on culture in that culture is a mashup of all the things that have gone before. Disney, for instance, made a fortune making animated movies based on stories that were existing fairy tales and legends and therefore out of copyright. Now, Disney wants to prevent others from doing the same with its characters. Yes, we want creators compensated. But we can do that without letting copyright policy be driven by the special interests of a global mega corporation like Disney.
This is largely a moot point unless the US wants to withdraw from TRIPS (and implicitly the WTO) and join the list of countries that don't observe it such as... Eritrea, Kiribati, North Korea, South Sudan, and Turkmenistan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement
> Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless based on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14)
> Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations, as specified in the Berne Convention. (Art. 9)
---
14+14 itself isn't a bad idea, however it also implies that all of the other countries in the WTO agree to it.
Given concerns about companies based in the US being carless with copyright, that might be a hard sell.
Under the 14+14 law, even if an author chose to renew the copyright, most people could remix games (that had gone into the public domain) that were released when they were in their teens, with their kids (if they had any), which sounds amazing - I'd love to do that with my kids, or hit up my parents and find a game from their childhood and mess around with it.
Being able to riff on something in the public domain that was only made 28 years ago is categorically different than something made 70-120 years ago. I think the impact to the commons would be huge.
I like the idea I heard about taxing based on the owner's view of value.
Give 14 years free.
Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them some (smallish) percentage of that.
Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and then the work is in the public domain.
Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.
Especially now in a world where creating and publicizing abstract ideas is easier than ever, anything we're worried about people losing in duration they can make up for in volume.
And given that the actual purpose of copyright (in the US at least) is promoting the sciences and "useful" arts, making people a little "hungrier" by loosening the protection seems to be the way society should tilt.
And if you think that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have all hijacked it to train their models, it's kind of crazy that these are only limitations applied to private persons or small companies, but don't touch big corps at all.
We've endlessly talked about it here on HN and I think most people agree. I'm in favor of charging the copyright holder and increasing amount (doubles every 5 years or so), which eventually forces them to give up paying for so many different copyrighted works, and also if the work is insanely old, they would cost way above ROI.
Alternatively sell "Subscription Copyright" licenses that renew every 10 years at 10 million dollars, that's per story, so Disney would have to renew for all of their movies, every 10 years. Could probably put that revenue to better use somewhere else anyway.
Even simpler is you have to register within a year to get a copyright on a work and renew each year with an exponentially increasing fee.
Ie If you want to hold the copyright to a movie for 40 years you’re welcome to pay 2 billion dollars.
We'll be celebrating this at the Internet Archive! As a lead-up, we're again hosting our Public Domain Film Remix Contest: https://blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/2026-public-domain-day-r...
We'll be having an in-person celebration at our SF HQ later in January as well, details to come!
To avoid the advent calendar, this may be more useful:
For a literature-focused list of items entering the US public domain on 2026, Standard Ebooks has 20 ebooks prepared for release on January 1: https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026
> works by people who died in 1955
70 years. After death.
The rules have to change. 70 years is way too long.
Interesting case in point is Argentina. The Falklands War happened in 1982, so well within some people's lifetimes. I learnt a few years ago that photographs and writings from Argentina from 1982 are already out of copyright. Photographs from the UK are not, and won't be until seventy years after the deaths of the people who took them. So total contrast between the two jurisdictions and reflected in publications about the conflict.
In the former Soviet Union, pre-1973 material is out of copyright. Again within living memory. I don't know what Russia etc have done with copyright since then.
I would love to see a public poll on how long people think that copyright should be. I'm betting that the majority of the answers from normal people will be less than the current "author's lifetime plus 70 years" but also greater than 5 years. This is probably not a very profitable poll for Gallup to do, though...
The article has a link to
https://blog.okfn.org/2012/10/08/do-bad-things-happen-when-w... (Do Bad things happen when works enter the public domain?)
There are answer is no, but they’re ignoring the fact that when works enter the public domain they will invariably spawn horror movies “based” on the work. Pooh: Blood and Honey is the warning sign we all ignored to our detriment and now we’ll all have to watch the slasher version of T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” in 2026.
I hope you’re happy.
Finally! We'll get the Hollywood cinematic version of How to Win Friends and Influence People..
Something about this page doesn't seem to work for me. Clicking the tiles doesn't do anything. It's not ad-blocker-related, I disabled those to test.
As others have noted copyright duration is ridiculous. But more importantly it lacks severe counter-forces to balance out the explicit monopoly.
Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the protection of copyright.
If X is kept for sale for the sake of keeping copyright alive but it's not really selling much that should also affect the nature of the copyright. For example, a minimum fee you have to pay annually to keep copyright going would cull out the works that are no longer commercially viable.
The fee could be proportional to the overall sales of the works so that if your works were a huge hit in the 80's but sales have trickled down to a minimum you'd have to pay more (from the profits you've obviously received over time) to keep it copyrighted (which would force you to balance your copyrights to your net income from current sales), but if you published an obscure album decades ago that never got much traction your fees would be negligible (but you'd still have a minimum fee you'd have to pay regardless) so you would be incentivized to give up the "protection" and make it cheaper for everyone to let it fall in public domain.
Further, the various aspects of copyright could be torn down in different timeframes. Let's say you wrote a successful book in 1963 which made money but no longer sells much. You probably wouldn't mind letting the copies of the book fall in public domain but if you could keep the option to hold onto copyright for derivative works in case someone wants to make a film out of the book you could do that (again, with annual fees, but these could be lower if the original book could be freely copied).
Or some other scheme. I could soon think of dozens if I wanted to but you get the idea. How about a tax on the sales of copyrighted works that starts from 0% but increases by some percentage point each year. You can profit first but as years go by you will have to start paying more and more to keep it going as the overall balance approaches unprofitability.
Copyright doesn't have to be a complete monopoly, it could have shades of gray. Sure there are exemptions already (such as fair use, in some countries, or right to make backups under certain conditions) but none of them address the commercial stronghold copyright allows for companies to keep works of art hostage for decades and eventually, for centuries.
Entering PD at death+70y usually means a 100+-20y duration. Does anyone respect this silly timescale? Does any fine been imposed for a forgotten old work?
Compare that with a drug's IP: total of 20 years after the molecule patent, of which 8-10y in clinical trials and only 10-12y in profitable life. But everyone respects that until the last day and it brings billions back.
A short IP time would favor the small/poor creators that could earn something during their lifetime when the work is fresh, while a long one favors companies like Disney which can protect the copyright with their group of lawyers.
Here in Canada, nothing. Thanks to the retroactive copyright extension which increased the copyright period to 70 years, nothing will enter the public domain in Canada until 2042.
No software in the list, duration of copyright for software is not adapted to the specifics of the field, no hardware would exist anymore to make this kind of software useful. Pure waste.
I would’ve loved to see some notable highlights in this article!
The maltese falcon (the book, not the movie) is entering the public domain next year!
I just noticed the site contains a very misleading description of what a Community Interest Company is. They are not necessarily not for profits (a certain proportion of profits has to be used for the stated purpose) and they are not as tightly regulated as charities (they do not get the tax breaks charities do either) .
That is not to say this particular company is a bad thing (I have not problem with people getting reasonable remuneration) but if you want to know (e.g. if you are considering donating) its something you need to find out on a case by case basis.
This is not well known in the UK, let along outside the UK.
Swallows and Amazons is on the list? My favorite book; when I was a kid I read Czech translation published in 1930s, so I shouldn't be that surprised it's entering public domain.
This article seems to imply that when works enter into the public domain depend on where they were published. This is not true! It's based on where you are and when it was published.I E, if you're in the USA and some work published in a death+50 year country is in the public domain in said country, it would still be illegal to distribute in the US.
Similarly, some works that are published in the US but are not in the public domain there could be perfectly legal to publish in a death+50 year country.
Copyright has no business holding as long as it does.
in my old neighbourhood, there was a couple where the husband creatd the intro-jingle for one of the major local news shows.
they are playing his jingle for more than 20 years now.
he became so wealhty that he could afford to tear down his old house, move temporaly to a hotel with the whole family, while the new villa was built on the old ground.
This article and the articles linked in it only provide a selection of works entering public domain in 2026. Does anyone know of a database or list of works so that I can see all of them? Other than the Wikipedia article that only has a list of names.
There wasn't easy hover text or other way to reveal what's coming "this month" on their advent calendar. So spoilers for the impatient:
1 William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying
2 Arthur Ransome – Swallows and Amazons
3 Albert Einstein
4 Nan Shepherd – The Weatherhouse
5 Langston Hughes – Not Without Laughter
6 Wallace Stevens
7 Hermann Hesse – Narcissus and Goldmund
8 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film)
9 Barbara Hepworth
10 Evelyn Waugh – Vile Bodies
11 Geoffrey Dennis – The End of the World
12 Charlie Parker
13 Margaret Ayer Barnes – Years of Grace
14 Hellbound Train
15 Hannah Arendt
16 Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities
17 T. S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday
18 Thomas Mann
19 Agatha Christie – The Murder at the Vicarage
20 Franz Kafka – The Castle (English translation)
21 Walker Evans
22 Sigmund Freud – Civilization and Its Discontents
23 Stella Benson – The Far-Away Bride
24 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
25 E. H. Young – Miss Mole
26 P. G. Wodehouse
27 Vladimir Nabokov – The Defense
28 Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon
29 Roger Mais
30 Saadat Hasan Manto
31 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – InsatiabilityI wonder if there is a less annoying list I can read.
Wow. The first Nancy Drew came out the same year as the first Miss Marple. I always thought of Nancy Drew as a much later phenomenon.
Nothing in Japan from what I could find here or elsewhere… don’t understand why
edit: thanks to the dead commenter for clarifying. that sucks.
Mark Twain was one of the first writers to push for longer copyright, so his daughters could receive royalties.
A lot of WW2 heavyhitters from all sides:
Hitler, Mussolini, Patton, Churchill, Goebels. Even Anne Frank and Einstein.
Total Copyright Death. I am unconvinced that we need copyright at all, if there are strong antifraud laws that prevent people or corps from saying "I am the originator" when not the case. Copyright stifles distribution, derivative work, and longevity
Ridiculous that stuff from 1930 is what's coming out in the US.
Just make it 50-ish years, absolute max.
On a side note, that web page's presentation of the items is leaving much to be desired. I can't click on each individual item out-of-order on Safari.
EDIT:
Oh, it's a countdown/Advent calendar.
I mean I admire the creativity but I don't care enough to visit the page each day. Just give me the list.
nice
Interesting that copyright terms vary so much globally. Are there any notable works from non-Western countries entering public domain in 2026?
I genuinely don't understand the instinct of HN to decry copyright for fictional works in general. I would not find it distasteful for even a far longer copyright to exist. I just don't see it as a problem. What is the societal ill that is caused by being unable to sell Harry Potter fan fiction, ever? Why can the author not invent his own setting? I understand people want free things, but this sentiment seems to go beyond that. The work is still available to be bought and sold, and if the price isn't right, there are billions of other options. I don't get it. I don't feel personally entitled to make derivations of Moby Dick, so if I found out it had exited public domain somehow, that would not upset me at all.