Category Archives: copyright

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Virginia Woolf’s classic 1929 essay on feminism and creative work has inspired numerous analyses (like this one), adaptations (like this one), and projects … Continue reading →

Just two months from now, much of the world will celebrate another Public Domain Day, welcoming a year’s worth of works into the public domain. Many countries that have had life+70 years copyright terms for a while will get works … Continue reading →

In 1857, work began on a revolutionary new dictionary covering the entire history of English word usage with example quotations. The first installment of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, covering A through Ant, appeared in 1884. The last, … Continue reading →

Sometimes one work’s arrival in the public domain brings extras along with it. In two days, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page, which Peter Marks called “the best play about newspapering ever written”, joins the public domain. … Continue reading →

John Taine’s science fiction novel Green Fire is set in 1990, and some of what it describes fits that time, like television and mobile phones. Other aspects, like gender and social customs, read much more like 1928, the year it … Continue reading →

While Lady Chatterley’s Lover was eventually published intact, Djuna Barnes’s first novel Ryder never was. Barnes replaced passages she was forced to cut with asterisks, “showing plainly”, she wrote, “where the war, so blindly waged on the written word, has … Continue reading →

One of the longest-running “Can we publish this?” questions in literature concerns Lady Chatterley’s Lover. D. H. Lawrence first issued his erotic novel in Italy in 1928. The UK and US banned it, and also stymied its copyright. Later court … Continue reading →