What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2011?

I'd like to know what DID enter the public domain, more than getting sorry for what did not.

The 'public domain' hasn't been what's acceptable to share according to lawyers for quite some time now.

Unfortunately, because of discontinous extensions, no published works are entering the US public domain again until 2019:

http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday

Of course, whether any actually enter the public domain then depends on Congress not retroactively extending copyright terms again. Perhaps Congress will choose a term of 'heat death of the universe, plus one day' — which the courts could still uphold as technically 'limited' per the Constitution.

In addition to the (currently down) http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2011 link provided by 2mur this blog entry also talks about what entered the public domain this year: http://blog.okfn.org/2010/10/18/which-works-enter-the-public...

Also, my interpretation of the original post is that it's not a mere lamentation but also a reminder to question the current state of copyright and public domain legislation. Who benefits? Who loses? To what degree? And why? And it does so with concrete examples.

Copyright law is really disappointing here. How do such long terms contribute to the progress of sciences or the arts? The writers and main contributors to most of the pieces named are dead. The publishers have made their cash time and time again and now most of these pieces are by no means "hot sellers", though they may be of cultural or historical interest. And, there's 40 years left before the copyright expires.

All this does is allow two extra generations to leech off of the creativity of their fathers without actually contributing anything themselves. Same goes for the two subsequent generations that fill the publishing houses that originally print these works.

Do we really believe that Lord of the Rings or Lord of the Flies would not have been written or published if the copyright term was only 28 years (in fact, they _were_ published when the copyright term was 28 years)? It should be evident that cultural experiences will be generated even if the money doesn't flow down for 100-200 years (not that there won't be money anyway -- they'll just have to do something useful with the property, just like anyone else).

The whole thing is just patently ridiculous. What do we gain by refusing to allow free commentary or contribution on Lord of the Rings? Tolkien is dead and gone and made a comfortable existence on his work I'm sure. If he was concerned with ensuring his posterity and publisher would have money from his work, he could have taken various measures to do so, like divesting large amounts of money to them in his will.

It is ridiculous that all of society and culture has to suffer because of corporate lobbyists that don't want Disney et al to lose money. It's not like the publishers are being robbed here, they've made more than enough money on these properties and now it's time to share. Intellectual property was never meant to trap ideas -- it was meant to make their sharing plausible and reasonable (before the internet, there was significant overhead involved with publication and wide dissemination of such material). Now we just have leeches looking to ensure their own fat paycheck at the expense of free culture.

I would be very happy to see a copyright law of 28 years since publication or less with no extensions, applied retroactively to all works under copyright in the United States. I don't see why life of the author should be considered -- if someone writes a good story, that's great, but 28 years of unlimited monopoly on that is quite enough. And note that public domain doesn't mean the copyright holder can't make money anymore -- it just means he has to provide something that the market deems valuable, instead of standing as a gatekeeper and profiting off of everyone else's imagination.