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.

• 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.