Copyright expires
The collected works of pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Irish poet and dramatist W. B. Yeats are now freely available online, since copyright restrictions have now expired. The Telegraph newspaper reports that their works have already been published on websites such as Wikipedia, while they are 'freely downloadable on electronic reading devices such as Kindle':
Under European Union law all books, poems and paintings pass into the public domain 70 years after the death of their creator.For more, the online blog Nomadics speculates on the implications of the copyright shift for contemporary translations of Freud's work: 'Freud for All'.
At midnight last night the works of artists and thinkers who died throughout 1939 slipped out of copyright, meaning they can be reprinted and posted on the internet without incurring royalties.
In addition to Yeats and Freud, the list includes Arthur Rackham, the illustrator whose drawings appeared in early versions of children's books such as Peter Pan and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the novelist Ford Madox Ford, and Howard Carter, the archaeologist who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt.
A selection of works by the artists will be available on Wikisource, a sister website of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, from today.
Wikimedia, the not-for-profit foundation that runs the sites, hopes that further works will be uploaded by the public throughout the year, providing near-complete and legal archives of the artists' output.
The end of copyright also means that the works can be freely downloaded onto electronic reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle. [Read the article]
