Celebrating the Public Domain

It may be February already, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to discuss everyone’s favourite unofficial holiday: Public Domain Day! Given the holiday’s annual subjugation to its gaudy, over-commercialised twin brother, New Year’s Day, it’s possible some of you forgot to formally celebrate this year, or were even unaware of its existence entirely. Luckily, here at The Saint, the festivities never end.

But first, some legal jargon. The public domain is the collection of all creative works free from copyright, which anyone can legally access, use, adapt, reference, and distribute without authorial permission. It’s the reason we have Wicked and West Side Story, and why you can sell posters of the Mona Lisa without paying Leonardo da Vinci royalties. Since copyright durations differ from one country to the next, the public domain can change across nations. In the UK, as is the case within most of Europe, copyrights expire seventy years after the creator’s death, at the end of the calendar year. Therefore, on 1 January each year, a new wave of artistic works become freely available to the public. It’s like Christmas morning all over again.

So what’s new to the UK public domain in 2025? Most notably, the artworks of Frida Kahlo and Henri Matisse, the writings of Colette and James Hilton, and the film Man with a Movie Camera. In the US, where copyrights last ninety-five years after publication, the characters of Tintin and Popeye entered this year. Every year, these additions to the domain are inevitably coupled with crude, debasing adaptations (such as last year’s Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey) that take ruthless advantage of this new artistic freedom. Indeed, a Popeye the Slayer Man is already in production. These films, and the backlash they annually inspire, often paint the public domain in a bad light: a mechanism of cultural blasphemy that twists and degrades every ‘good’ human creation. But the existence of such works is a societal triumph; they champion the freedom of expression and cultural resiliency, promoting a world in which our greatest creative efforts do not exist for their creators alone.

But for those of us not planning a Gigi slasher film, how do we use the public domain? After all, the domain by itself is merely conceptual, a hypothetical freedom of access; it means nothing without databases through which to concretise it. In this regard, the internet has become the greatest vehicle the public domain has ever known. There’s Wikisource and Project Gutenberg for books, Wikimedia Commons for images, and Internet Archive for everything in between. When you know where to look, the online public domain is the greatest museum, library, cinema, concert, and scrapbook ever created.

And yet, the public domain is far too often described negatively, as a state of absence: everything not copyrighted, without protection; everything that, from a legal and commercial perspective, no longer matters. This leads to the perception of the domain as something akin to the Island of Misfit Toys — an endless swath of human creations that have succumbed to their age and achieved complete irrelevance, available to all merely because there’s nothing left to do with them.

Out of this image emerges the prevailing belief that the public domain, as a societal afterthought, doesn’t require active support. After all, why should one protect something whose existence is merely an acknowledgement of insignificance? But, again, the public domain is merely a concept — it means nothing without application. What value is a book in the domain without a database to access it? And what good are such databases if the public doesn't know about them?

The public domain demands the public. It needs support to exist beyond the abstract. Fully realised, it is not a state of irrelevance, but of liberation; not a pile of expiration dates, but an inexhaustible goldmine of culture and creative opportunity to pillage and plunder free of cost. Existing databases are great, but they’re also imperfect and incomplete. Even Matisse’s own Dance (accompanying this article) suffers the common injustice of a poor-quality photo. To indulge in blatant metaphor, there’s a better image of harmony to be had. And while it may be unrealistic to dream of everyone shouting “happy Public Domain Day” when the ball drops, there is a future out there where we’re all cheering about dead copyrights — dead copyrights and free culture.

Image from Wikimedia Commons