Where To Find U.S. Public Domain Works from 1923
Everything first published in the U.S. in 1923 is now out of copyright. But what resources can lead you to those works?
In two articles this year, I painted the picture of the legal structure and cultural implications of the entry of everything first published in the U.S. in 1923 entering the public domain—that’s all published books, magazines, newspapers, poems, artwork, compositions in sheet music form, plays (the scripts, not the performance), movies and more.
But the public domain is a conceptual space: It defines a lack of copyright protection, and has to be examined to determine what properly falls into that category. There’s no definitive list produced by the U.S. Copyright Office, because copyright is effectively all about private ownership and litigation.
The expiration of maximum terms forms a strong line that few litigants are likely to cross, however (though this isn’t legal advice on my part). From January 1, 1998 until Dec. 31, 2018, that line stood at 1922. Anything known to have been first published in the U.S. (or published abroad with U.S. niceties) in 1922 or before was affirmatively in the public domain. There was no way for a published work that met formalities to have a copyright past 1997.
On January 1, 2019, we welcome 1923 to that affirmative place! But you still need to ensure works were first published in the U.S. in 1923, or if published outside the U.S. that they met U.S. copyright requirements.
Here are a few resources that should help.
Note: Despite what you may have read, Felix Salten’s Bambi is not in the public domain. A complicated court case in the 1990s was resolved on appeal in 1996 finding that its “proper” U.S. copyright was 1926 and it was correctly renewed in 1954, a requirement at the time. Bambi: A Life Story in the Woods enters the public domain January 1, 2022.
Hathi Trust
The Hathi Trust is a collaboration among a number of libraries and research institutes that centralizes digital resources, including scanned books, both in and out of copyright. For the general public, it provides full text access to anything its member researchers have determined is in the public domain.
The trust created a collection at its site that’s exclusively comprises works published in 1923 that are now in the public domain—over 53,000 at this count! That includes Robert Frost’s New Hampshire, which contains his poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
The trust also lists hundreds of thousands of published items that fell out of copyright protection for failure to renew or for not meeting other formalities once required when publishing a work.
Center for the Study of the Public Domain
This Duke Law School organization has celebrated “Public Domain Day” annually for many years, even though nothing entered the public domain until this year—it was an act of memory and defiance as to what would have happened if the 1998 copyright extension law hadn’t passed.
This year, however, the center had an extensive post listing a number of prominent works, along with background information and links to more.
The Internet Archive
A long-running defender of the right of the public to access the collective cultural past and present, the Internet Archive has millions of scanned items. The group hasn’t yet assembled a collection of 1923 works, but you can use this advanced search to constrain the dates to that year. These works aren’t rigorously rights-cleared, but you can confirm the copyright it appears in the scans.
Google Books
Google Books has the largest-scale book-scanning project in the world, including a fairly massive number that date from 1923 and earlier. However, it hasn’t seemingly yet celebrated 2019’s entry of new titles.
When I contacted Google for my Smithsonian article, I was unable to get a list of titles or even confirmation for some titles that it would be adding to its fully downloadable and viewable archives. While they told me they would flip a switch to make works from 1923 available as of January 1, when I use the search constraint to only search within January 1, 1923, to December 31, 1923, I receive no results!
Chronicling America (Library of Congress)
This comprehensive newspaper archive starts in 1789 and goes through 1963—in part. The bulk of entries stop at 1922, because of the public domain “wall,” and as of January 3, 2019, the LOC hasn’t updated its documents or dataset to fully include 1923. Some newspapers from 1923 to 1963 are included that researchers believe fell into the public domain, but not the full 1923 set.
