Celebrating the Public Domain

• Pages: 7-13
• Date: 01 December 2026
• Published date: 01 December 2026
• Author: Jennifer Jenkins,James Boyle
• Subject Matter: Derecho Constitucional

Published in Landslide, Volume 18, Number 2, 2026. © 2026 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights

reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an

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LANDSLIDE December/January 2026

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Celebrating the Public Domain

Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle

In the U.S., it is constitutionally required that copyrights are for “limited times.”1 Perpetual copyright would be

unconstitutional. January 1 of each year is Public Domain Day, when works enter the public domain.2 Neverthe-

less, we have to wait a very long time for that day to arrive. On January 1, 2026, works published in 1930 entered

the U.S. public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925.3 They became free for all to copy, share, and build

upon. All of the books, lms, songs, and art published through 1930 are now in the public domain.

Why Celebrate the Public Domain?

Our economy and culture depend on a delicate balance between that which is and is not protected by intellectual

property (IP) rights. Both the incentives provided by IP and the freedom provided by the public domain are crucial to

the balance. Until recently, most contemporary attention has gone to the realm of the protected.

Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain was the first university center in the world devoted

to studying the public domain. Since 2010, it has rung in the new year with an annual Public Domain Day article.4

It began as a counterfactual, because no published works were entering the public domain in the U.S. In 1998, the

Copyright Term Extension Act halted the annual expiration of copyrights by adding 20 years to the copyright term.5

Works from 1923, originally set to come out of copyright in 1999, would not be freely available until 2019. So for