Sherlock Holmes Enters The Public Domain — Here Are The Other Works Free To Use In 2023

Topline

Copyrights on works from 1927, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s short-story collection The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouseexpired Sunday, becoming free for public use without permission or cost, as more works entered the public domain after an extended 95-year period.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes” entered the public domain Sunday.

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Key Facts

Other books entering the public domain include Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New YorkAgatha Christie’s The Big FourWilliam Faulkner’s Mosquitoes and Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women.

Movies entering the public domain include the first feature-length film The Jazz Singer, Wingswinner of the first Academy Award for outstanding picture, 7th Heaven and Metropolis.

Musical compositions—the music and lyrics, not recordings—entering the public domain include Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” Duke Ellington and Bub Miley’s “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “East St. Louis Toodle-O” and Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues” and “Gully Low Blues.”

Copyrights from 1927 were initially scheduled to expire in 2002, though the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act extended their expiration date to 2023.

Surprising Fact

The phrase “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream” was not publicly available until Sunday—Howard Johnson, Bill Moll and Robert King’s composition “(I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for) Ice Cream” was first published under copyright in 1927.

Key Background

The new wave of works entering the public domain is now fully available to be legally shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost. Copyrights from 1927, in addition to other copyrights attributed later to works published that year, expired after an extended 95-year period. Copyright expiration extends to works that have been lost, including 75% of American silent films, according to the Library of Congress. Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, said extended copyright terms have “contributed to the loss of our cinematic heritage” because some older works have since disintegrated and have been lost to time, preventing their preservation.