Public Domain Day

January the 1st is also "Public Domain Day"

Here is a world map showing the various copyrights :

But when a book (or any creative work) is in the "Public Domain"... what does it mean ?

Every year [...] due to the expiration of copyright protection terms on works produced by authors who died several decades earlier, thousands of works enter the public domain. This means that their content is no longer owned or controlled by anyone  :  it rather becomes a common treasure, available for anyone to freely use for any purpose. Such works can also become a building block for new creations : people can transform a poem into song lyrics, or make a movie based on a public domain novel  : you can check your local cinemas to see how often that happens ! Literary works can be published or printed on paper, websites, for friends or school use. While you can print a fine leather-cover book, its content  will remain available for free to everyone, since it is in the Public Domain. The same goes for images, art works and other kinds of creative works entering the public domain under the same term expiration rule.

Adapted from  publicdomainday.org

Did you know this ?!

On January 1, 2011, their work entered the Public Domain :

F. Scott Fitgerald,  Paul Klee,  Leon Trotzky,  Nathael West (etc...)

 On January 1, 2010 :

Sigmund Freud,  William Butler Yeats (etc...)