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FINALLY<\/p>\n
\n\n\n…that will change on Jan. 1, when \u201cThe Prophet\u201d enters the public domain, along with works by thousands of other artists and writers, including Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, P. G. Wodehouse, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens.<\/p>\n
This coming year marks the first time in two decades that a large body of copyrighted works will lose their protected status \u2014 a shift that will have profound consequences for publishers and literary estates, which stand to lose both money and creative control.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n\n\nBut it will also be a boon for readers, who will have more editions to choose from, and for writers and other artists who can create new works based on classic stories without getting hit with an intellectual property lawsuit.<\/p>\n
\n…<\/div>\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nThe sudden deluge of available works traces back to legislation Congress passed in 1998, which extended copyright protections by 20 years. The law reset the copyright term for works published from 1923 to 1977 \u2014 lengthening it from 75 years to 95 years after publication \u2014 essentially freezing their protected status. (The law is often referred to by skeptics as the \u201cMickey Mouse Protection Act,\u201d since it has kept \u201cSteamboat Willie,\u201d the first Disney film featuring Mickey, under copyright until 2024.)<\/p>\n
Now that the term extension has run out, the spigot has been turned back on. Each January will bring a fresh crop of novels, plays, music and movies into the public domain. Over the next few years, the impact will be particularly dramatic, in part because the 1920s were such a fertile and experimental period for Western literature, with the rise of masters like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n