The first day of January is always worth celebrating. It's the start of the new year, a time when all things seem possible. It's when we reset the books to zero and start to count anew, whether that means yearly income, days we've skipped exercising or sins. And this year it carries particular significance, as it was when we could rip the last page off the calendar of the bummer of a year we have just endured. But it's also the date when certain published works of art, be they music, films or books, roll over and become fair game for any and all to use, change, adapt and generally play around with without a phalanx of lawyers ordering them to cease and desist. Forget happy new year; it's happy public domain day.
Copyrights in one form or another have been around in this country almost since the beginning, with the Copyright Act of 1790. Signed by George Washington, it protected books, maps and charts for 14 years, with a right of renewal for another 14. Subsequent revisions and additional legislation extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years, while works sporting corporate authorship like guides and handbooks are protected for 95 years after first publication or 120 years after creation, whichever is earlier. There was also a twenty year pad tacked onto individual works created before 1978, effectively bumping protection on them to 95 years.
The bottom line is that the first day of the new year brings a crop of works into the so called "public domain" where they are there for the taking. This year is a particularly rich one, as 1925 saw a number of notable artists and authors hard at work. On the literary front there was Virginia Woof's "Mrs. Dalloway" and Earnest Hemingway's' "In Our Time." In the world of film there was Harold Lloyd's "The Freshman" and Buster Keaton's "Go West." And if you turned on the radio you would have heard Irving Berlin's "Always," Gus Kahn & Walter Donaldson's "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" and the number one song of the year, Ben Bernie's "Sweet Georgia Brown."
But the biggest gem to become fair game by far is F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." Up until now, if you envisioned a line of Daisy Buchanan iPhone cases, or wanted to call the flagship vintage of your fledging vineyard "Jay Gatsby Pinot Noir," you would have had to get permission from Fitzgerald's estate and cut them in on the profits. No more. Now you could even go to Egg Harbor itself and open the "Tom Buchanan Power Gym" and you'd be in the clear.
Or if you're Michael Farris, you can finally publish the book you wrote five years ago, but the lawyers said had to wait. Farris wrote "Nick," the imaged backstory of the Nick Carraway, the narrator of "The Great Gatsby" without realizing the original novel was still protected. When he presented it to his publisher, he was told it would be too expensive to get the permissions needed to make it work. So he shelved the project, and waited till this year. And now he's making the rounds, knowing that Jay's buddy Meyer Wolfsheim, the guy whose had cufflinks "made out of the finest specimen of human molars" won't be coming for him looking for his cut.
Gatsby joins other well-known works that moved into the open including Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan." Sure, before they were in the public domain you could have used any of them as the basis of your great idea, but it would have cost you. Now you can market Harry Houdini Hand Sanitizer, Molly Malone Masks or Wicked Witch Web Cams and keep all the proceeds for yourself.
And next year? Notable additions will include "Winnie-the-Pooh" and "The Sun Also Rises." But with the BBC calling 1925 perhaps "the greatest year for books ever," it will be hard to top "Gatsby" and "Arrowsmith" and other works from Gertrude Stein and Theodore Dreiser. So time to craft the mish mosh you've always wanted to where Frankenstein shows up at a Long Island Jazz Age party and meets Zorro while Daisy chats with Paul Bunyan and Rosie the Riveter swaps stories with Dorothy from Oz. Could work.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford reads a lot. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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