January 1, 1928. A day that will live in... famy? After fears that the public domain (PD) would remain frozen forever, it started... very slowly... moving forward again in 2019 in the United States. This year's Public Domain Day is unusually momentous, as a certain rodent you may know has finally been set loose. One of the driving forces behind multiple rounds of copyright extension in the United States over the last century was lobbying from the Disney corporation. The most recent of them, the 1998 Mickey Mouse Protection Act, was called that for a reason: repeated copyright extensions allowed Disney to keep their grasp on the oldest iterations of Mickey, whose first appearance was in the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie. It locked up tons of other harmless photographs and books in limbo as well, which was just too bad as far as Disney was concerned. However, we did not see another extension, and now Steamboat Willie has entered the public domain, along with a massive pile of other works.

More specifically: works published in 1928 are now unconditionally in the public domain in the United States (many lesser works were probably already public domain due to not being renewed, but now there's no need to verify the lack of renewal). In countries that use author's life plus some number of years, that means a few things: in "life + 70" countries, authors who died in 1953 had their works hit the public domain; and in "life + 50" countries, authors who died in 1973 have their works in the public domain. There are some complications here for Wikipedia though, which we will get into shortly.

This topic has been covered in a number of places, so here are some useful links:

• 2024 in public domain, 2024 in American public domain, and Public Domain Day, for the on-wiki articles.
• Welcome to the Public Domain, Mickey Mouse!, a post on the official Wikimedia Foundation blog.
• January 1, 2024 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1928 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1923!, an article from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University.
• Happy Public Domain Day 2024!, an article from the Public Domain Review.

What can I do (on Wikimedia projects)?

Works are now free to use! Well. With caution. In general, copyright issues are something that it's best not to start uploading too aggressively on if you aren't sure. Copyright status will affect whether you ought to upload to English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and/or Wikisource.

Step 1: Finding it

The above links already include the major works entering the public domain. However, you can go hunting for more obscure works, if you like. Category:1928 works and its subcategories are a good start. You can also browse around the Internet Archive; this is a preloaded query for works from 1928 that you can adjust to taste with other keywords, authors, or titles.

Step 2: Is it actually in the public domain?

See also: Commons:Hirtle chart and Commons:Copyright rules by territory

• If the work was solely American and published in 1928 (or before), it's public domain.
  • Example: The 1928 animated short film Steamboat Willie!
• If the work was published in 1928 but not in the United States, but the author died in or before 1953 / 1973 (see Commons:Copyright rules by territory to look up the relevant country if you aren't sure whether to use 50 or 70 years), then it's public domain.
  • Example: The 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness; author Radclyffe Hall died in 1943. Or Lady Chatterley's Lover, whose author D. H. Lawrence died in 1930.
• If the work was published in 1928 but is still under copyright in its home country, then uploading to Commons is against policy there. However, such works can be used locally on English Wikipedia. The relevant policy is Wikipedia:Non-US copyrights, where it is indicated that works in the public domain in the US are accepted regardless of the copyright status in the home country. Mark such files here on English Wikipedia with Template:PD-US-expired-abroad, which has some nice effects, such as no longer needing to comply with our non-free content policies such as downscaling resolution. In the source editor, it'll look something like {{PD-US-expired-abroad|out_of_copyright_in=20XX}}; replace the year with when it enters the public domain in its source country.
  • Examples: Metropolis (1927 film), which is public domain in the US but under copyright in Germany. The House at Pooh Corner, which is now public domain in the US, but is still under copyright in the UK, hence why File:Pooh meets Tigger, illustration by EH Shepard.gif is a local-to-English-Wikipedia upload and not at Commons.
• If the work was published between 1929 and 1963, the author died in 1953 / 1973 or before, and the source country uses author's life + X years rules, then... maybe! Was it first published in the US, or published simultaneously around the world including the US? Was it published with a copyright notice in compliance with formalities? If it was, was the copyright renewed in the United States?
  • Stanford's Copyright Renewal Database – You can perform a search here. Quite a lot of works were not renewed in their copyright.
  • The URAA "restored" various copyrights (sometimes to non-existent or unknowing "holders" of these copyrights) in 1994. The easiest way around this is if the work was simultaneously published in the United States and the source country. The other possibility (but a rare one) is if the work was already public domain in the source country in 1994 (unlikely; for many countries, this means the author needs to have died in 1924 or earlier). See Wikipedia:Non-US_copyrights#Five-point_test. Simultaneous US publication is usually the criterion most commonly met for this case.
  • If it's an American work published between 1929–1963 (e.g. first published in the US), you can throw the above author's life calculations in the trash, and skip straight to checking if the copyright was renewed. But that was already true and nothing really changed with this Public Domain Day.
• If the work was published anonymously in non-American countries that use a copyright term of author's life + X, you should check the relevant country's rules at Commons:Copyright rules by territory. Many of them will say that copyright is kept for the same length of time as X, as if the author died the same year as publication; meaning many anonymously published works such as random photographs are public domain if they are from 1953. Just make sure to include in the image description why you believe that the work truly is anonymous and some due diligence to show this; "I found it on the Internet and I'm not sure from where" doesn't make it an anonymous work. The work also will need to be in the public domain by American rules, of course.
• Music has its own bespoke rules, thanks to the mostly public-domain-hostile Music Modernization Act: but luckily, this doesn't matter often on Wikipedia. The short version is that sheet music and lyrics from 1928 and before are public domain,as are new recordings of said music that explicitly release the rights; also, specific recordings from 1923 and earlier are now public domain.

Step 3: Using it

The easiest thing to do is go upload some images! You can flip through those newly public domain books or pause old 1928 silent films, then upload extracted images to Commons. Then use them on Wikipedia.

For largely textual works, this means that long quotes are now permissible to use on Wikipedia, as long as you attribute it. I don't think this will come up very often unless someone finds and uploads a major 1928 reference work – Category:1928 non-fiction books is slim pickings, but perhaps the Small Soviet Encyclopedia? Be careful here, though; back in the day, some Wikipedia articles were preloaded with the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (see Template:EB1911), and sometimes it's better to have nothing at all than to have something a century out of date. Here's a preloaded search of 1928 encyclopedias at the Internet Archive; mostly some 1928 publications of The New International Encyclopedia and World Book Encyclopedia, which are maybe mildly more up-to-date than earlier editions.

For the most deluxe treatment, if you think that there's sufficient interest in a work that digitizing the text is valuable rather than flipping through images, there is Wikisource, our local transcription site (think Project Gutenberg). Basically, you'll want to follow the procedure at Help:Adding texts. Hopefully a PDF of the scanned book already exists at the Internet Archive (for major works, it probably does); ^[a] you'll upload that PDF to Commons after making triple-sure that it really is free content in both the US and its source country. (And make sure you upload the 1928-or-earlier scan, not a later printing or edition.) Then follow the Wikisource instructions; you can create a page-by-page transcription as well as combined full-chapter webpages that span across multiple scanned pages. This will be much faster and easier if the PDF already has the text natively, of course, rather than relying on the fallback Wikisource OCR and manually fixing its many errors. Making a Wikisource edition might make sense for the most popular or important texts. After this is all done, go to the External links section of the Wikipedia article on the scanned work, and proudly link your contribution with Template:Wikisource-inline! (See s:The Prose Edda (Brodeur 1916) for an example finished work, or Index:The House at Pooh Corner for an example in-progress work.)

What can I do (as a person)?

This is the section where we give the usual free content enthusiast whining about copyright law, and how maybe you can do your part by informing your local representative / duke / overlord of the merits of an active public domain. That it would be better if copyright terms were much, much shorter, or if, at the very least, that we went back to a system of having to renew copyright registrations, meaning that orphan works could be freed for general use. Unfortunately, there is a problem here. The Hippocratic Oath says "First, do no harm," but every time politicians have looked at copyrights, it has almost always been to greatly extend them, even when it made negative sense to do so. ^[b] The Copyright Act of 1976 passed 316–7 and 97–0; the 1998 Sonny Bono Act passed by a voice vote (i.e. it wasn't controversial enough for a recorded vote). Calling up your local politician and encouraging them to start a new copyright-related bill may well make the problem worse, not better, judging by the track record so far.

You might think based on the above that, even if 95 years is too long, at least we'll see a steady march into the public domain year-by-year. That's a nice thought — and it will be true for a while — but in reality things are much worse. As overly long as the US's copyright term for 1929-1977 works is, life-of-the-author + 70 years is usually even longer, and that's the system we'll be in for works published after 1978, even American works. ^[c] Granted, most of the people reading this will be dead in 2072, ^{citation needed} but that doesn't make it any better. Consider an unknown photograph obviously made in 1980 with a listed creator (so not anonymous), but the name is extremely generic and no information can be found on them. When will this photograph be safe-ish to use, assuming no further changes to copyright terms? Well, maybe a precocious 10-year old took the picture, and maybe they lived a long and full life to age 105, and maybe someone with a claim to their estate is extremely litigious. Math time: 1980 - 10 + 105 + 70 = the year of our Lord 2145 that this picture from 1980 is safely public domain. At least under the classic US system of mostly caring about publication date, at some point tracking down vague authors becomes irrelevant.

So, here is a modest proposal, which "merely" requires modifying international treaties a little. There should be a fallback instituted that says that the copyright term is either author's life + X years or Y years since publication, whichever is shorter. Copyright terms already extend far, far after everyone involved was dead. To avoid hypothetical 10-year old photographers & artists locking up orphan works forever, even a weak rule that said "copyright term is either author's life + 70 years, or 120 years after publication," would be a step forward. Ideally, something stronger would be nice (say, a global 95 years after publication limit? Or even 75 years after publication?), but we'll take what we can get at this point. Does anyone know any world leaders and can get this through?

Notes