Happy new year, and happy release to a new round of works made freely available to the public domain. Copyright is a useful protection for creators but its long reach keeps many cultural touchstones hidden and often unused for generations. As I recently explained in a comment thread, I limit my published fan fiction to those inspired by works in the public domain. Now there's a bigger list to legally expand and explore!
The Duke University Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain celebrates copyright expiration every year for both public education and awareness regarding potentially overlooked, forgotten, or even destroyed past artistic creations. Now anything published in 1927 is freed from US copyright law protection, including:
Metropolis serves as an example of copyright expansion causing damage instead of protection to the original work. Its copyright originally lapsed in 1955 back when a renewal was required after twenty eight years. A 1996 law sent any such work back under protection for 95 years, counting from the original copyright date. After almost a century parts of Metropolis were lost due to decay and lack of preservation. But copies with missing scenes were found in 2008 by an Argentine museum and the New Zealand National Film Archive. Now anyone may openly share, distribute, promote, and learn from this influential science fiction dystopia, one of the first of its kind.
For a not-so-subtle segway to my own writing: my new novel Estancia Aldea Norteña retells the public domain book Northanger Abbey in an alternate universe (AU). Set in 2008 Argentina, the basic characterization and setup is the same but the circumstances and societal expectations are very different. Each blog post this week will lead up to chapter one dropping on Epiphany this Friday.
While I look forward to many more new works derived from old sources, both as a reader and writer, copyright is certainly not all gloom and doom. I recently released my first eBook, and I hope to publish more in the future, including original works. Also, while sticking to the public domain prevented me from posting some stories, it's helped me discover different sources of inspiration: The Flame comic, whose unique power set creates novel scenarios outside the the usual DC or Marvel sandbox, and Star Surgeon, which only came to my attention due to the free public domain audiobook site Librivox.
The 2022 three sentence ficathon prompts sent me to both these works and more over the past year, challenging me to write across a variety of styles and worlds. In fact, my writing output grew so much that I began tracking stats. It will not surprise readers to know that I drew from Jane Austen more than any other author. However, I posted eight Sherlock Holmes stories and expanded my repertoire to include new dialogue and monologues based on plays by Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. I got back into poetry after years of neglect, even trying my hand at iambic pentameter and sonnets!
Looking at the series as a whole, approximately 46% of the stories were inspired by a female author and 38% by male; the remainder were based on myths, legends, and fairy tales without an individual source. Of the known authors, one was Canadian (for Anne of Green Gables), 67% were British, and 15% were American. These numbers inspired me to check out A Treasury of African American Christmas Stories from the library, an anthology which could not only lead to great fandom works but also holiday specials for stage or screen.
My goal in 2023 is to continue writing, exploring, and posting in both familiar and new avenues, whether through fan fiction, publishing, or some of the half-completed stories kept in stasis on my hard drive. I don't know exactly what the future holds, just as those creators in 1927 couldn't know what the impact of their works would be. Hopefully we all learn, grow, and inspire new creativity in the unfolding twenty first century.
