The Public Domain Day, celebrated this weekend, will introduce several particularly noteworthy new works to our cultural commons. As summarized by the Duke Law School’s Center for Public Domain Studies, early 2023 will feature Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s latest Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as the groundbreaking science fiction movie Metropolis, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and the first feature-length talkie. The Jazz Singer’s US copyright will expire.
The public domain allows anyone to republish, remix, or remake works without the permission of the rights holder, often long after the original author has died. As noted in Duke’s summary, the public domain frees archivists to preserve and redistribute works that might otherwise be lost, such as numerous silent films (including Metropolis), whose copyright will expire definitively this year.
The Holmes story also marks the end of a legal debate about how copyright law should treat character. Many of Doyle’s previous works were already in the public domain before 2019, but the author’s property has argued that this shouldn’t slacken his copyright. This has led to a lot of legal confusion over the unauthorized new Sherlock Holmes stories, including a now-settled lawsuit against Netflix for the Enola Holmes spinoff. Now, with this new decision, we will be able to see the new comments of the world’s greatest detective as completely public domain.
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