January 1 is always Public Domain Day: works that were under copyright on December 31 the previous year, enter the Public Domain on this day. The first day of a new year is always a nice day for people who like open access. January 1, 2022 was a special Public Domain Day. Not only did paintings from artists who died in 1951 become openly available, but so did music recordings by Artur Schnabel, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and books by André Gide and Abanindranath Tagore – all artists who died in 1951. Lists of writers, musicians and other artists who passed away in 1951 were made public in Wikipedia and beyond. In the United States, there were even more celebrations. Due to a 2018 US law (the Music Modernization Act), 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 entered the public domain.

The 1998 US Copyright Term Extension Act gave works published from 1923 through 1977 a 95-year term. This meant that a long list of books first published in the US in 1926 entered the public domain on January 1, 2022. A nice overview of works 95+ years old was given by Duke Center for the Study of Public Domain.^[1] This means that, in the United States, these books are not bound by copyright any more: Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne (including the drawings by E. H. Shepard). I hear the Brits objecting: Milne died in 1956 and Shepard died in 1976, so according to copyright laws in most European countries their copyright will expire later (2027 for Milne, and 2047 for Shepard). So did these works enter the public domain or not?

Did I say that copyright was simple? No, copyright is almost always complicated, and laws differ from country to country. To make it more complicated, Wikipedia is not organized by country, but by language. In this case, one has to look in which country a book was published. And yes – the first book starring Winnie-the-Pooh was also published in the United States in 1926. The discussion is already flourishing on Commons, and the drawings by E.H. Shepard are now (28 January) in Commons (and in this article)... but they are proposed for deletion. Arguments on both sides are given, and administrators will decide on the matter. A crucial question will, of course, be a decision about the dominance of US copyright. Will the 95 year rule, as laid out in the 1998 US Copyright Term Extension Act, overrule the 70 years PMA (post mortem author) as used in most countries, and will this be the dominant factor in Wikimedia Commons too? I didn't see any reference to the Berne Convention, that lays down a minimal general copyright term of 50 years beyond the death of an author (50 years PMA). In that case, the Pooh drawings would have to wait till 2027 to be used in this Signpost article.

Don’t think I brought in all details. Looking for Tigger? He is still copyrighted, having come to life in the 1928 follow-up book The House at Pooh Corner (so he will enter public domain in 2024.)^[2] If you want to read Pooh in the meantime, go to Standard Ebooks, who prepared several books for Public Domain Day, including Winnie-the-Pooh.^[3] One thing is quite sure: don’t use images with Winnie-the-Pooh wearing a red shirt. The red shirt is an addition by Walt Disney Studios, and likely copyrighted for years to come (what the heck – bears don’t wear shirts).