The Public Domain
I envy the Japanese the extreme clarity that everything in their work has. It’s never dull, and never appears to be done too hastily.
Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo, September 1888
What do Winnie the Pooth, Dr Jekyll, and Peter Pan have in common?
They’re public, meaning there’s no copyright with their characters. You can print and sell a Sherlock Holmes book. You can make a video game with Winnie The Pooh.
What’s the public domain?
Some time after an artist passes away, all of their work becomes “public.” That means losing the copyright. Their work becomes free for everyone to enjoy, reproduce, modify, or do anything with.
The terms “artist” and “work of art” apply in the broadest sense here. Anything that can be copyrighted like books, photographs, music, paintings, sculpture, etc will fall into the public domain, except trademarks. I tried to include various sources throughout the article to give you an idea.
This varies by countries, with the US and Canada having some of the longest copyright period.

Why should I care?
There’s no reason a 1750 book should be the same price as a 2022 book, but that’s happening. Publishers get away with it by creating “new editions” with “a new foreword by [insert trendy author]”. But the original text is always the same. Often, even the illustrations are the same.

Let’s take Alice in Wonderland, illustrated
If wanted to read Alice in Wonderland, the illustrated version, you didn’t know about the public domain, you might have gone to Amazon or a bookshop and bought for it. You can get the same ebook for free online, with the same illustrations, completely legally.
But reading online is terrible?
More examples:
- Do you have 3 Shakespeare books to buy? Get a used e-reader instead. For less than $20 you’ll be able to read all the classics for free. Forever
- Want a Van Gogh poster in your house? Don’t go to Amazon, go to a local printer, download and print a high-resolution image. It will be cheaper and you’ll support a local business.
- Do you want to gift The Great Gatsby to someone you know has an e-reader? Buy another (copyrighted) book and write a link to the free ebook on a piece of paper. Now you’re giving them two books.
And so on, you know where I’m going with this.

Lettre à Mr d’assier Champollion?
A thousand miles up the nile, Amelia
A whole new world
I can’t overstate how gigantic the public domain is. There’s art from every corner of the world, books from every era, from Shakespeare to Japanese art via Grimm’s fairy tales.




What about music?
Music is a bit trickier. With digital music, there are always two parts: The composition, and the performance. Someone has to record the song for you to hear it. And that recording is often more recent, and copyrighted.

How do I know if something is public domain?
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice
Generally, anything published before this year minus 96 is free. In 2025, that’s 1929. As a rule of thumb, you should be safe with anything created before 1900. This varies by country so be careful.
Except trademarks, Coca-Cola was created in 1886 but their logo isn’t public domain. Academic papers also seem to be in a legal grey area.
Every year, on January 1st (known as Public Domain Day!) Duke University’s School of Law publishes a list of creations entering the public domain.

Dangers
Corporations want to maximise their profits out of artists, even long after their death. Copyright lasted 56 years until 1976, when it was extended to 75 years. In 1998, lobbies got an extension to 95 years. All works of art from the 1920s were basically frozen for 20 years.
Canada voted (in July 2022) to extend copyright, and that law should never have passed. Even Elon Musk agrees with this.
Current copyright law in general goes absurdly far beyond protecting the original creator Overzealous DMCA is a plague on humanity — Elon Musk
I think copyright should be based on revenue per derivative work. Meaning, if you’ve made $50 million from a book, that’s it for the book. But just the book, you still own the rights to other derivatives.

Where to find Public Domain art
- Ebooks, beautifully typeset on Standard Ebooks
- Ebooks, lots of them on Project Gutenberg
- News, ebooks and illustrations from the Public Domain Review
- Sheet music from the International Music Score Library Project
- All the national libraries and museum websites that you can think of
- The Public Domain Image Archive
Thanks,