When Does Copyright Expire, and Why It Paused for 20 Years

Somebody wants to reprint a photograph, sample a recording or adapt a novel, and the first question is always the same one. When does copyright expire is a question with three different answers, and which one applies depends almost entirely on when the work was made.

For anything created since 1978 the term is the life of the author plus seventy years. For corporate and anonymous work it is ninety-five years from publication. For anything older, the answer depends on paperwork filed decades ago that most owners never bothered to file.

Underneath those rules sits a stranger fact. For twenty years nothing entered the American public domain at all.

The rule for anything made today

The governing text is section 302 of the Copyright Act. Under its first subsection, copyright in a work created on or after 1 January 1978 subsists from creation and endures for the life of the author plus seventy years.

Note what that does not require. There is no registration, no notice, no renewal and no fee. Protection attaches the moment the work is fixed in a tangible form, and it runs on a clock nobody has to wind — a doodle on a napkin is covered on the same terms as a novel.

Joint works use the last surviving author. Two collaborators means the term does not begin counting down until the second of them dies, which can add decades.

Measuring a property right by a human lifespan produces some odd results. Two works finished the same afternoon by a writer of twenty-five and a writer of eighty will leave copyright roughly half a century apart, which means the protection attached to a book has more to do with the age of the person who wrote it than with anything about the book.

The rule when there is no author to measure

Plenty of work has no single human life to count from. A film, a database, a corporate report or a piece of software written by a team belongs to the company, and there is no death to wait for.

For those, the statute uses fixed periods instead. An anonymous work, a pseudonymous work or a work made for hire endures for ninety-five years from first publication or one hundred and twenty years from creation, whichever expires first.

The “whichever expires first” clause is doing real work. It closes the gap that would otherwise let a company hold something unpublished indefinitely, since the hundred-and-twenty-year clock starts at creation whether or not anything is ever released.

An anonymous work can also switch tracks. If the author’s identity is later recorded with the Copyright Office, the term converts to the life-plus-seventy measure.

Everything older runs on a different clock

The 1978 boundary is the single most useful thing to remember, because the system before it worked on completely different principles.

Older copyright was a bargain with conditions attached. Protection came from publication with proper notice, lasted an initial term of twenty-eight years, and could be extended only if the owner actively renewed it in the twenty-eighth year. Publication without the required notice could forfeit protection outright.

Miss the renewal and the work fell into the public domain immediately, regardless of how valuable it was or how alive the author happened to be. There was no grace period and no way back.

That regime governs a vast quantity of twentieth-century material, which is why determining the status of an old photograph is genuine research rather than a lookup.

Most old copyrights died of paperwork

Here is the part that surprises people, and it is the most practically useful fact in the whole subject.

The renewal step was a filing, and filings cost attention. A publisher with a catalogue of thousands had no reason to renew the ones that had stopped selling, and individual authors frequently did not know the requirement existed.

The consequence, on the historical record, is that the vast majority of works published in the United States before 1964 were never renewed for a second term. They entered the public domain after twenty-eight years, not ninety-five.

So the common assumption — that anything from the twentieth century is probably still protected — is close to backwards for the material that stopped earning. The blockbusters were renewed. The ordinary output of the century largely was not.

Congress ended the requirement for works published from 1964 onwards, which are renewed automatically. The dividing line is exact and it matters enormously for anything published either side of it.

Then the public domain stopped for twenty years

Between 1999 and 2018, no published work entered the American public domain. Not a single one, for twenty consecutive years.

The cause was the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which added twenty years to existing terms, revising them to ninety-five years from publication for corporate authorship and life plus seventy for individual authorship.

Because the extension applied to works still in copyright rather than only to new ones, everything queued to expire simply moved back two decades. The queue did not advance for a generation.

It restarted on 1 January 2019, when published works from 1923 finally arrived. Nothing had entered since 1998.

The extension was challenged and upheld. The Supreme Court considered whether Congress could keep lengthening terms without eventually breaching the constitutional requirement that copyright last only for limited times, and concluded in 2003 that setting the length was a matter for the legislature rather than the courts.

The freeze is the reason the public domain feels like a recent discovery to younger readers. For anyone who came of age between 1999 and 2018, it genuinely never moved.

Sound recordings ran on their own track entirely. Recordings made before 1972 sat outside federal copyright and were governed by a patchwork of state laws with no clear expiry at all, until legislation in 2018 pulled them into the federal system and gave them a schedule with actual end dates.

Why 1 January is the only date that matters

Copyright terms do not expire on the anniversary of a death or a publication. They run to the end of the calendar year in which they would otherwise lapse, so everything expires at midnight on 31 December.

The effect is an annual release rather than a continuous trickle. Each new year the whole of one publication year arrives at once, which is why archives, publishers and film restorers plan around the first of January the way other industries plan around a financial quarter.

Since the restart, that has proceeded steadily: 1923 in 2019, and one further year every January since. Works published in 1930 entered the public domain in January 2026.

This is also why “it is nearly out of copyright” is rarely a safe basis for anything. The date is knowable to the day, and being early is infringement rather than enthusiasm.

Why the term keeps getting longer

American copyright began at fourteen years, renewable once for a further fourteen. It is now routinely more than a century, and every extension along the way has followed the same political pattern.

The economics of that pattern are worth stating plainly. Extension concentrates an enormous benefit on the tiny number of old works still earning money, and spreads a diffuse cost across everyone who would have used the rest.

Concentrated benefits produce organised lobbying. Diffuse costs produce nobody in particular, which is a familiar shape in any regulated market and the same asymmetry that shapes how music royalties work, where the parties at the table set terms for a vast number of people who are not.

The competing argument is not empty. A longer term raises the value of a catalogue, and catalogue value is part of what funds new production — the same logic that drives the licensing decisions behind why shows move between streaming services.

What the argument struggles with is the retroactive part. Extending the term on a work published in 1925 cannot possibly incentivise its creation, because it was created under the shorter term and the author is dead.

What to check before assuming something is free

Copyright status is a research question, not an inference from vibes. Four checks resolve most cases:

• When was it published, and was that before or after 1 January 1978
• If before 1964, was the copyright renewed in its twenty-eighth year — the registration records answer this
• Is there a named author, or is it corporate, anonymous or work made for hire, which changes the clock entirely
• Which country’s law applies, because terms differ and a work free in one place may be protected in another

Two traps catch people repeatedly. A new edition, translation or restoration can carry its own fresh copyright even when the underlying work is free, so a public domain novel in a modern annotated edition is not entirely public domain.

And the Copyright Office publishes its own guidance on duration, which is worth reading before relying on any summary. Its position on works published before 1978 is simply that the term varies with several factors and the statute has to be consulted.

The honest summary is that modern work has a long, predictable and automatic term, while old work has a short and conditional one that most owners let lapse. The two systems produce opposite intuitions, and mixing them up is where nearly every mistake comes from.