It’s a brand new year, and that means a ton of art and entertainment has gone from privately owned to the property of everyone and no one. In the United States, books, films, songs, and other works published in 1927 are free to be shared, remade, re-mixed, and otherwise used without fear of legal repercussion, as are literary works from authors who died before 1952. Below are 12 works you can do whatever you want with in 2023. Kind of.
Because there’s still money to be made from older intellectual property, it’s a more complicated than the passage of time making everything public domain. Generally, artistic works become public domain when enough time has passed, but sometimes the fictional characters within them (or some aspects of those fictional characters) are still owned. It’s a mess.
