Copyrights expire on Jan. 1 in the United States for works created in 1927—two days after Canada closes off its public domain for expansion for another 20 years.
The movie featuring the grandmother of onscreen humanoid robots will become the people’s property in the United States when Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent classic MetropolisMetropolis enters the public domain on Sunday—along with other creative works copyrighted that year.
The Jan. 1 expiration of a year’s worth of copyrights makes these works free to share and enjoy and opens them to rewrites and remixes. So if you want to take Lang’s dystopian tale of a city where an industrial ruling class oppresses workers—in which a metallic “machine-human” plays a notable part—and recast it for today’s headlines, you won’t have to pay anybody to do so starting Jan. 1.
A post from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain highlights other notable members of the class of 2023, such as Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, the Alan Crosland-directed movie The Jazz Singer, and the music and lyrics of Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley’s “Black and Tan Fantasy.
