On January 1st each year – New Year’s Day, but also “Public Domain Day” – thousands of creative works automatically enter the public domain for the first time. This means the original creator or copyright holder loses their exclusive rights (e.g., for reproduction, adaptation, or publication), and the work in question becomes free for use by all. It happens with movies, poems, music, artworks, books – where creative protections typically last until 70 years after the life of the author – and even happens with source code in some cases.

Opening creative works to the public domain also opens the door to all manner of new uses. Earlier this year, an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923, and the well-known Winnie-the-Pooh, became public. (That’s Winnie-the-Pooh in hyphenated form – not the newer, shirt-wearing version from 1961 that’s still owned by Disney.) With most of the characters from A.A. Milne’s 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh book now public, we’re starting to see creative adaptations and expressions Milne likely never expected or intended. Indeed, the old hyphenated version of the honey-loving bear is already being adapted for a horror movie: “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey”… with Pooh and Piglet as the villains. 

Counterintuitively relative to many classic intellectual property (IP) strategies, experimentation and recombination can sometimes grow the value of IP. This is a core dynamic of open source movements, which explicitly allow the public to build upon (or fork and duplicate) existing technology. A large part of what makes Android, Linux, and other successful open source software projects so competitive is their embrace of such permissionless innovation. Crypto’s success at attracting public development is similarly due to its general endorsement of open source, and “remix culture,” which is especially true for some NFT communities. 

On January 1st each year – New Year’s Day, but also “Public Domain Day” – thousands of creative works automatically enter the public domain for the first time. This means the original creator or copyright holder loses their exclusive rights (e.g., for reproduction, adaptation, or publication), and the work in question becomes free for use by all. It happens with movies, poems, music, artworks, books – where creative protections typically last until 70 years after the life of the author – and even happens with source code in some cases.

Opening creative works to the public domain also opens the door to all manner of new uses. Earlier this year, an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923, and the well-known Winnie-the-Pooh, became public. (That’s Winnie-the-Pooh in hyphenated form – not the newer, shirt-wearing version from 1961 that’s still owned by Disney.) With most of the characters from A.A. Milne’s 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh book now public, we’re starting to see creative adaptations and expressions Milne likely never expected or intended. Indeed, the old hyphenated version of the honey-loving bear is already being adapted for a horror movie: “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey”… with Pooh and Piglet as the villains. 

Counterintuitively relative to many classic intellectual property (IP) strategies, experimentation and recombination can sometimes grow the value of IP. This is a core dynamic of open source movements, which explicitly allow the public to build upon (or fork and duplicate) existing technology. A large part of what makes Android, Linux, and other successful open source software projects so competitive is their embrace of such permissionless innovation. Crypto’s success at attracting public development is similarly due to its general endorsement of open source, and “remix culture,” which is especially true for some NFT communities.