It’s a new American tradition. January, for followers of music and literature, marked when some classics written a lifetime ago entered the public domain. A 1976 copyright law had granted authors and composers 75-year copyrights on their works. In 1998, just before the oldest works protected by that 1976 law were about to enter the public domain, Congress extended the term to 95 years.
Finally, on Jan. 1, 2019, some of those old works entered the public domain.
This year, Rhapsody in Blue, George Gershwin’s classical masterpiece, entered the public domain, along with several books by literary giants: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, E.M. Forster’s A Passage To India, and A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young.
“Believe it or not, the U.S. Constitution by design mandates that copyrights last for limited times so that works fall into the public domain, where the public has free access to them and, importantly, where future creators can freely build upon them,” linguist Jennifer Jenkins, the director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, explained to NPR.
Already looking forward to next year, F. Scott Fitzgerald enthusiasts have been happy to learn that in 2021, the copyright to The Great Gatsby will expire.
That means anyone can write a Gatsby spinoff, sell Gatsby-themed merchandise, or make a movie with a soundtrack featuring Jay-Z. (Wait, that one’s already been done.)
The Great Gatsby, released in 1925, was published by Scribner. Once it enters the public domain, anyone can publish his or her own edition, old sport!
“We’re just very grateful to have had it under copyright, not just for the rather obvious benefits, but to try and safeguard the text, to guide certain projects and try to avoid unfortunate ones,” Blake Hazard, Fitzgerald’s great-granddaughter and a trustee of his literary estate, told the Associated Press. “We’re now looking to a new period and trying to view it with enthusiasm, knowing some exciting things may come.”
The internet has seen an uptick in references to the Roaring ’20s now that we’re in 2020, so expect the release of The Great Gatsby to inspire a new era of Prohibition-era idolization. It will have a whole new generation misunderstanding the story about the collapse of the American dream and repeating the words of Jay Gatsby himself: “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!”
