Happy Public Domain Day.

[Rev. Rye]

For the first time in decades, after a huge copyright extension act spurred on by Disney (and also Sonny Bono and the Gershwin estate) that froze copyright expirations for 20 years, a large chunk of media will be unleashed into the public domain in America.

When the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, movies, songs, and books created in the United States in 1923—even beloved cartoons such as Felix the Cat—will be eligible for anyone to adapt, repurpose, or distribute as they please.
A 20-year freeze on copyright expirations has prevented a cache of 1923 works from entering the public domain, including Paramount Pictures’ The Ten Commandments, Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim, and novels by Aldous Huxley.
Such a massive release of iconic works is unprecedented, experts say—especially in the digital age, as the last big dump predated Google.
“There is certainly great value in effectively restarting the public domain, but the mistake was having extended the term of protection for already created works in the first place,” Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, told Motherboard.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/artic...-years-eve

Works to enter the public domain as soon as the clock strikes twelve:

• "Out of Season" by Ernest Hemingway
  
• The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek
  
• The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
  
• Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo
  
• Demian by Hermann Hesse (well, its initial English translation by N.H. Piday)
  
• "St. Joan" by G.B. Shaw
  
• "The Red WheelBarrow" by William Carlos Williams
  
• The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) by Marcel Duchamp
  
• I And Thou by Martin Buber
  
• The first recordings of Louis Armstrong
  
• Safety Last, the 1923 film where Harold Lloyd hangs on a clock face.
  

Naturally, some of these works were either A) already in public domain in the countries that signed the Berne Convention, or B) won't become part of the public domain in those countries for decades, but the fact remains that the US is not one of those countries.