Public Domain Day

Yesterday was public domain day. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman, and Mikhael Bulgakov, among others, are now free of copyright restrictions.

Erm, in Europe.

This whole thing is really confusing, and I’m no lawyer.  But as far as I can tell, because of a 1998 law that extended copyright restrictions for twenty years (more for corporate-produced works), Americans won’t get a damn thing for another eight years. And if it were set up like it used to be, we’d be getting a hell of a lot, from Dr. Seuss to Waiting for Godot to Lord of the Flies to Tolkien. As it stands, in America, we won’t get anything until 2019, when the Disney Junta will no doubt sign a new law enforcing copyright forever upon pain of being sent to prison to watch Santa Clause 2 until death.

By the way, we can thank the Bonos, Disney and the Gershwins for extending the privatization of culture for several generations.

(via Metafilter and @electriclit)

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Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.

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