January 1st of each year marks the day when copyright runs out in many countries and enters the public domain. A majority of countries have a general copyright term of life+50 class (who died in 1957) and the second-largest bloc of life+70 class (who died in 1937). Simplified, this means that the copyright will expire either 50, 70, or some other year after they pass away. In the United States, all works published after 1923 will never enter the public domain. Works that were unpublished in the life+70 class will be copyright-free. The works include but are not limited to art, literature, accounts of discovery and adventure, biographies and autobiographies, scientific and philosophical treatises, film and theology, and architecture and poetry.

The life+50 class of the newly-Public Domain includes works by American novelist Anne Parrish; British novelist Dorothy Richardson; Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias; Romanian poet George Bacovia; Canadian-American geologist Reginald Aldworth Daly; American journalist, novelist, dramatist and poet Kenneth Lewis Roberts; Australian children’s author Gladys Lister; American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. [...]

Authors or other creators of “works” who died in 1937 include:

British writer and parliamentarian Walter Runciman; Canadian poet Michael Whelan; Russian novelist, playwright, and essayist Yevgeny Zamiatin; American orientalist Abraham Valentine Williams Jackson; British statesman and Nobel laureate Sir Austen Chamberlain; British politician Philip Snowden; American politician Newton D. Baker; Canadian librarian George Herbert Locke; British engineer and submarine cable developer Sir Charles Bright [...]

If you would like to view additional authors that entered the life+50 and life+70 classes this year, visit the CopyrightWatch blog.

[via BoingBoing]