The First Of January 2022,

was an important day, a huge number creative works were added to the public domain,

including Winnie-the-Pooh, above a four volume set of first edition copies of Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne. (Photo Credit: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg / Getty Images), 

also titles such as Bambi, a Life in the Woods, above a first edition of Bambi, a Life in the Woods by Felix Salten. (Photo Credit: Anonymous / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain) and amongst others Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is also now copyright free, a work becomes free from copyright when placed under the public domain, meaning others are allowed to use, share and adapt it without express permission from the creator. They also aren’t required to pay a fee for using it, while copyright laws in many countries allow the majority of works to enter into the public domain 70 years after their creator’s death, a law passed in the United States in 1998 made it so that they become available 95 years after they were first created.

Each year, new works are added to the public domain, and this year the most notable will be A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and Felix Salten’s Bambi, a Life in the Woods, along with silent films starring Greta Garbo and Buster Keaton, this coming year will also mark the first time early sound recordings will be made available under the public domain, following the passage of the Music Modernization Act in 2018. The first portion of the law allows the majority of recordings made before 1972 to be protected for 95 years after they were published, while the second made it so that those from before 1923 would be made public in 2022, 

so bands like Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds, (Photo Credit: Donaldson Collection / Getty Images) will be copyright free, prior to the act, the first sound recordings were not scheduled to enter the public domain until 2067, it is estimated over 400,000 recordings will be made available, including “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds and “Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin, great news and who knows what 2023 will bring!