Public Domain Day 2026: Celebrating human creativity and sharing
I’m glad we’ve reached a new Public Domain Day, and that the works I’ve been featuring in my #PublicDomainDayCountdown, and many more, are now free to copy and reuse. I’ve been posting about works joining the public domain in the United States, which include sound recordings published in 1925, and other works published in 1930 that had maintained their copyrights. (Numerous works from 1930, and later, that had to renew their copyrights, and did not, were already in the public domain, though many of the best-known works did renew copyrights as required.) This is the eighth straight year Americans have seen a year’s worth of works join the public domain, after a 20-year freeze following a 1998 copyright extension.
I intend my countdown not just to celebrate the works joining the public domain, but also to celebrate what people have done with those works. In some posts, I note later creations based on those works. In nearly all my posts, I link to things that people have written about those works. Like the works themselves, those responses may have flaws or quirks, but I value them as human reactions to human creations. Whether they’re reviews, personal blog posts, professionally written essays, scholarly analyses, or Wikipedia articles, they’re created by people who encountered an interesting work and cared about it enough to craft a response to it and share it with the world. Those shared responses in turn pique my interest in the writers and the works.
It wasn’t always easy for me to find such responses online. Sometimes I’d go searching for responses to a promising-sounding work, and only find sales listings on e-commerce sites, social media posts not easily linkable or displayable without logging into a commercial platform, paywalled articles that many of my readers can’t view, or generic-sounding pages that read like they were generated by a large language model or a content farm, but not by anyone who I could clearly tell cared about or even read the work in question. Some works I initially hoped to feature got left off my countdown, replaced by other works where I could more readily link to an interesting response.
The people publishing the responses I link to are often swimming against a strong current online. Many online writing systems– including the one I’ve been writing these posts on— are now urging their users to “improve” their posts by letting “AI” write them. Some writers may be tempted to allow it, when facing an impending deadline or writer’s block or anxiety, even when the costs can include muffling one’s own voice, signing onto falsehoods confidently stated by a stochastic text generator, or abusively exploiting existing content and services. Other writers may feel pushed to put their work behind paywalls or other access controls that makes them less likely to be plagiarized or aggressively crawled by those same “AI” systems. And most writers, myself included, find it easy to dash off a quick short take on a social media platform, be quickly gratified by some “like”s, and then have it forgotten. It’s harder to take the time to craft something longer or more thought-out that will be readable for years, and that might take much longer for us to hear appreciated. The easy alternatives can discourage people from devoting their time to better, more lasting creations.
As I’ve noted before, both copyright and the public domain serve important purposes in encouraging the creation, dissemination, sharing, and reuse of literature and art. One reason I write my public domain posts is to promote a better balance between them, particularly in encouraging shorter copyright lengths to benefit both original creators and the public. Similarly, as I’ve noted in another recent post, I value both human creation and automated processes, but I increasingly see a need to improve the balance between those as well, especially as some corporations aggressively push “generative AI”. While I appreciate many ways in which automation can help us create and manage our work, I treasure the humanity that people thoughtfully put into the creation of literature and art of all kinds, and the human responses that those creations elicit.
Today I’m thankful for all of the people, most no longer with us, who made the works that are joining the public domain today. I’m thankful for the new opportunities we have to share and build on those works now that they’re public domain. I’m thankful to all the people who have responded to those works, whether as brief reactions or as new works as ambitious as the works they respond to. And I hope you’ll keeping making and sharing those responses with the world when you can. I look forward to reading them, and perhaps linking to them in future posts.
#PublicDomainDayCountdown
John Mark Ockerbloom
Everybody's Libraries
Project Gutenberg
