Blog post by Stephen Wyber
1 January each year marks the moment when a new wealth of materials (books, songs, art and other forms of expression) loses the protection offered by copyright against actions like copying, distribution, translation, or more by entering the public domain. Throughout the month, including today in Brussels, events are organised both to celebrate this and to discuss current and emerging issues.
A Reminder – Why the Public Domain?
In countries with a copyright duration of 70 years after the death of the creator, this means works from those who died in 1955 are now in this situation, including Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and Fernand Léger. For those who follow the international minimum of 50 years, works by those who passed in 1975 are now entering the public domain, such as Hannah Arendt or P.G. Wodehouse.
Overnight, all of the rules that impose artificial scarcity on these works are gone. While these restrictions make it possible to create markets and so earn money, once commercial demand has gone (or if it never existed), they are a recipe for market failure. As the Australian Productivity Commission noted in 2016, the term duration of life+70 is ‘completely implausible’ from an economic point of view.
For libraries, entry into the public domain is a liberating milestone. After decades of preservation and care for works which have long been out of commerce, it is suddenly no longer necessary to seek permissions to give wider access to relevant works in their collections and to allow their use (at least as concerns economic rights under copyright).
This can make digitisation and outreach projects far easier and more cost-effective, allowing libraries to do more in line with their missions and boost their impact. Indeed, anecdotal evidence indicates that, for example, when deciding which materials to prioritise for preservation and digitisation, the fact that a work is in the public domain can be a major plus, even if a work still under copyright may have greater value or merit.
The Ghost of Public Domain Day Future
So what challenges lie ahead? Amongst others, these include ongoing efforts to extend copyright terms (such as recently in Italy, and despite the evidence from Australia cited above), questions about how the public domain is defined and protected, and unease about the benefits accruing to major tech companies with the resources necessary to use public domain works to train major new AI models.
A really fundamental question, albeit one that we’ll only fully see the consequences of in decades, if not a century or more, is how we make sure that works created today survive long enough to actually reach the public domain.
The works feeding the public domain in 2026 were typically created in the first half of the 20th century, when the primary ways of publishing information were through committing them to paper, vinyl, or canvas. As physical objects, they could be bought and sold, and then safeguarded for the future.
The works that will feed the public domain a century from now will often be digital instead. Indeed, the shift of newspapers, journals, and more from analogue to digital means that there may not even be hard-copy formats left much of the time.
Crucially, these cannot be acquired in the same way. As a result, libraries and other institutions that have traditionally played the preservation role that the market doesn’t are no longer able to do so. All of a sudden, the silent guarantors of the inflow of works into the public domain risk being cut out of the picture. And in due course, the taps will start to run dry, with those works not available for library preservation having been long since forgotten, creating a 21st-century black hole.
Call the Plumber!
There are luckily solutions here. Many libraries do have an active approach to collecting digital materials, and indeed, legal deposit legislation in a number of countries has been updated to allow for deposit or harvesting of electronic content.
At the same time, these laws often give commercial actors (who have little incentive to think about the benefits to society a century from now) more control than is the case with physical books. They can determine what sort of access is possible and how such works can be used.
It may also be the case that, rather than each library being able to build a collection, there will be greater concentration, with only deposit libraries able to use what possibilities exist in law.
Another step is to revisit strengthening guarantees of libraries’ ability to fulfil their missions in a digital world. Licences for digital content should not stand in the way of fundamental (and traditional!) library activities such as preservation and lending. Instead, libraries should be empowered to ignore or override terms that seek to do so. The same goes for rules on out-of-commerce works, which should seek to maximise access and offer clearer possibilities for eLending.
As highlighted, simpler copyright treatment should also change the calculation for libraries when determining what to preserve. This would be achieved both by making things more efficient in general and by ensuring that conservators never again risk having to avoid preserving a work because clearing copyright is too much of a hassle.
While the previous points have mainly touched on copyright and related laws, there are also other relevant areas, such as competition or consumer law (if applied to libraries), for example, when publishers simply refuse to license to libraries.
Conclusion
While entry into the public domain represents a loosening of the restrictions created by copyright, whether works make it there depends a lot on the way we design copyright and other rules today.
When it is possible to deny or restrict the ability of essential preservation infrastructures to function, for example by refusing sale, preventing preservation copying and more, this weakens the public domain in advance.
When rules around preservation, digitisation, and use are restrictive, it makes less sense for libraries to focus on in-copyright content, and encourages a focus on those works that are already in the public domain and therefore simpler to handle.
As we celebrate the Public Domain in 2026, it’s important to work now to make sure that future Public Domain Days also have just as much to celebrate.
15 January 2026
