Good news... but also bad news for the Public Domain: Benvenuto Betty Boop, arrivederci Italian Photos.
Public Domain Day arrived on January 1 this year. Copyright terms for works expire on an annual basis, so each new year brings a fresh set of works into the public domain. This is great for everyone, but great in particular for Wikipedia and other WMF projects, as it means we can use them without restriction! Images, quotes, videos – all on the table.
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The earliest versions of Betty Boop entered the public domain. 1930 was a good year for detectives, as Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage (the first novel featuring Miss Marple) is now publicly usable, as are The Maltese Falcon (the novel version) and the first four Nancy Drew novels. Nine more Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts are now free, including The Chain Gang and The Picnic, which introduced the earliest versions of a character later known as Pluto the dog. While the novel All Quiet on the Western Front already hit the public domain a few years earlier, its 1930 film adaptation is now freely available, as well. William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is another notable item freed up. This is just a small slice of what's available – 2026 in public domain has a much more extensive list.
The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University wrote their annual write-up here:
The Public Domain Review also wrote a good article:
If you're interested in helping use some of the recently freed material, there are some more detailed suggestions at this 2024 Signpost article on the topic. In particular, images and video can be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons, while text transcriptions of PDF scans can be made on Wikisource. As examples, see the Wikisource transcription projects at The Murder at the Vicarage or The Secret of the Old Clock, but to be clear, there's plenty more obscure works that editors should feel free to take a hack at.
While they're a bit less "spicy" than the novels and films listed above, for Wikipedia purposes, some of those old 1930 textbooks, atlases, and other reference works still have relevant images that can now be scooped up with no fear of surprise copyright issues. Sometimes an old picture of goat teeth or the like is better than nothing, if there isn't a more recent version of a reference image, or if the fact it was created in 1930 is itself of interest, such as old maps. – SF
Until last December, the Italian copyright law used to allow non-creative pictures to enter the public domain twenty years after their publication, in contrast with stronger and longer rights reserved to works of art photography. However, a slight change introduced by a new law meant to reinforce the rights of photographers moved the limit from 20 to 70 years – the same as fine-art pictures – raising eyebrows and worries over the impact it could have on pictures available in the public domain and used by cultural institutions.
As first reported by user Friniate on Commons' Village pump and in a discussion at the it.wiki Bar, on November 26, 2025 the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Italian Parliament, officially passed a bill named "Provisions for the simplification and digitization of procedures relating to economic activities and services for citizens and businesses", which was later published on the Gazzetta Ufficiale on December 2, and came into full effect on December 18. The bill had officially been presented in the Senate of the Republic – the Parliament's upper house – in July 2024, as an initiative of Ministers without portfolio Paolo Zangrillo (Public Administration) and Elisabetta Casellati (Institutional Reforms); it was later approved and sent to the Chamber of Deputies in October 2025, before completing its iter the next month.
Albeit much larger in its scope, the newly-approved bill has been criticized by the open access community due to a specific passage included in its Article 47, which changes just a single word of Article 92 from the 1941 Italian copyright law, but provides significant changes to the PD-Italy rules. The original version of Art. 47 set a clear distinction between fine-art photographic works and non-creative pictures: the former category was granted moral rights for the entirety of the author's life and up to 70 years after their death; the latter category – which includes images of notable people, historical events, cultural heritage and other works of art shot by professional photographers and other authors – received related rights limited to use for economic purposes, and non-creative pictures were allowed to enter the public domain twenty years after their publication. The formulation introduced by the new law does not change the types of copyright granted to these respective categories, but sets a 70-year limit for both of them to enter in the public domain, effectively blurring the lines between the two concepts. For context, this means that non-creative pictures shot and published from 2005 onwards will enter the public domain only in 2076 under the current law. However, since the law will likely be non-retroactive due to constitutional principles, it will not apply to pictures that were already in the public domain on December 18, 2025.
Promoters of the law and the Ministry of Culture – which had already sparked controversy over a public domain ruling in the past – defended it by describing it as a tool to reinforce the rights of photographers and major commercial archives, like ANSA and LaPresse, in a professional environment where digitalized and/or non-creative pictures bear economic and personal advantage for decades. However, associations such as Creative Commons (CC) and Wikimedia Italia (WMIT) have raised concerns over the impact the law might have not only on photographers themselves, but also on civil society, potentially affecting non-profit organizations and cultural institutions, like museums and libraries, that actively promote the use of open access data for public research. CC and WMIT already expressed criticism on a "sister" bill that had been originally presented at the Chamber by deputies Alessandro Amorese and Federico Mollicone in February 2025, and took part in an audition on the same subject at the house's Commission for Culture in June 2025, with Ferdinando Traversa representing Wikimedia Italia as president.
In an analysis of the new law on non-creative pictures, lawyer Arlo Canella also noted how the changes to the copyright law seem to be in contrast with European laws on intellectual property, such as Article 14 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (2019/790), which states that reproductions of works of visual art in the public domain cannot be subject to copyright, nor related rights, unless they constitute original creative works. – O
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