What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2022?A Festive Countdown
At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of works enter the public domain and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose. Find here, in this advent-style calendar, our top pick of what lies in store for 2022. Each day, as we move through December, we’ll open a new window to reveal our highlights!
Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain — and here we focus on three of the most prominent. Newly entering the public domain in 2022 will be: works by people who died in 1951, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (e.g. UK, Russia, most of EU and South America); works by people who died in 1971, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, and most of Africa and Asia); and works published in 1926 (and all pre-1923 sound recordings), for the United States.
With December now past, see the calendar unfurled as a list in our Public Domain Day blog post.
26
Arnold Schoenberg
29
W. B. Yeats’ Estrangement
19
Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary
15
Sinclair Lewis
1
A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh
4
Faust directed by F. W. Murnau
23
Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
27
D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent
24
Igor Stravinsky
31
Don Juan directed by Alan Crosland
5
Louis Armstrong
25
Battling Butler directed by Buster Keaton
28
Diane Arbus
10
Oscar Micheaux
17
William Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay
3
Dorothy Parker’s Enough Rope
14
Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck
8
Jim Morrison
20
Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Land of Mist
18
Stevie Smith
12
Ivor Novello
21
Miyamoto Yuriko
22
T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom
7
Sound recordings published prior to 1923
11
The Scarlet Letter directed by Victor Sjöström
13
Franz Kafka’s The Castle
2
Ludwig Wittgenstein
6
Vita Sackville-West’s The Land
30
André Gide
16
Bertolt Brecht’s Man Equals Man
9
Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises- See more new entrants to the public domain in 2022 on this Wikipedia page, and, for US public domain, these pages for books published and films released in 1926.
- Check out John Mark Ockerbloom’s own Public Domain Day Countdown through the Twitter hashtag #PublicDomainDayCountdown and summarised in a blogpost here.
- Read more about what makes the public domain so important in Communia’s Public Domain Manifesto.
- Wondering if “bad things happen to works when they enter the public domain”? Wonder no more.
