We Had to Wait 95 Years – Now the U.S. Classics Are Free!

The new decade has brought forward thousands of once-copyrighted works from the United States, now available on the public domain after 95 years of exclusivity. This means that 1924 classics are finally free to use – without permission or fees!

Because of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which added two decades onto their original copyright term of 75 years, the internet hadn’t seen U.S. works become public for 21 years. In 2019, the long gap was finally passed.

“We can’t predict what uses people are going to make of the work we make available,” said Mike Furlough, executive director of the digital library HathiTrust, to the Smithsonian last year. “That’s what makes that so exciting.”

Many works from the 1920s have either gotten lost or damaged past the point of recovery. Digitizing whatever is possible and adding them to the public domain could truly aid conservation efforts, ensuring the classics are relished for decades to come. From musical compositions like George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” to films like Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr., to books like Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit, anyone can turn these works into their own, adding annotations, additions and modifications – and even profiting from them, if so desired.