I want to cry.
What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2010?
...would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws
- Agatha Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye
- Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451
- C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (the fourth book in The Chronicles of Narnia)
- J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories
- Leon Uris’s Battle Cry
- James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain
- Ian Fleming's Casino Royal
- Robert Heinlein’s Starman Jones
- Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation
- Arthur Clarke’s Childhood's End
- First issue of Playboy, with Marylin Monroe on the cover
- Watson and Crick Nature article on the double helix of DNA
Movies:
- Abbott and Costello Go To Mars
- From Here to Eternity
- Hondo (starring John Wayne)
- Kiss Me Kate (starring Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel)
- Julius Caesar (starring Marlon Brando)
- Walt Disney's Peter Pan
- H.G. Well's The War of the Worlds
- the cult classic Glen or Glenda
Plus, of course, ~85% of the content created in 1981.
Lists like this are problematic... they focus on big-name, well-known works, and many people react by saying, "well, why *shouldn't* the writer/publisher still be making money from it? It's still in use!" We don't have lists of the thousands of lesser-known, not-in-print books and movies that probably wouldn't have been renewed after 28 years, and certainly would've been available after 56.