public domain

January 1st 2010 — and every January 1st – is public domain day, the day we celebrate the entry of copyrighted works into the public domain. In the United States no published work will pass into the public domain tomorrow — nor the next year, nor any year until 2019. (If you lived in Europe you might now be celebrating the release of the works of Freud or Yeats.) Thus, we have little to celebrate, and many costs to mourn.

Europeana’s collection of online European heritage passed the 5 million mark in early December, taking the multilingual digital library, museum and archive over halfway to its target of 10 million searchable items in 2010. Portraits of notable Polish figures, including astronomer Copernicus and composer Frederic Chopin are among the newest additions to Europeana – part of some 257,000 images, texts, videos and sounds that were submitted by regional groups across Poland.