What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2023?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. 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 2023 will be:

  • works by people who died in 1952, 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 1972, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (e.g. New Zealand, and most of Africa and Asia);
  • films and books (incl. artworks featured) published in 1927 for the United States.

In our advent-style calendar below, find our top pick of what lies in store for 2023. Each day, as we move through December, we’ll open a new window to reveal our highlights! By public domain day on January 1st they will all be unveiled. (And, of course, if you want to dive straight in and explore the vast swathe of new entrants for yourself, just visit the links above).

13
Frances Benjamin Johnston
27
Elizabeth Robins
24
Franz Kafka’s Amerika
11
Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf
9
Caroling Dusk, an anthology of verse by Black poets of the 1920s
1
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
29
Agatha Christie’s “The Tuesday Night Club”
31
William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes
12
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans directed by F. W. Murnau
21
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time
25
John Dewey
18
Benedetto Croce
30
Jamini Roy
8
M. C. Escher
17
The Jazz Singer
2
Edward S. Curtis
28
Mariano Azuela
3
Wings directed by William A. Wellman
5
Cecil Day-Lewis
19
James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones
10
Céline Arnauld
6
Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang
23
Fletcher Henderson
22
Ezra Pound
16
Marianne Moore
20
Maria Montessori
14
James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach
15
Paul Éluard
4
Paramahansa Yogananda
7
Knut Hamsun
26
Joseph Roth’s Flight without End
  • Check out John Mark Ockerbloom’s own “Public Domain Day Countdown” through the hashtag #PublicDomainDayCountdown on Twitter and Mastodon, and summarised in his blogpost.
  • 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.