Public Domain

As a writer, the idea of copyright and public domain is a very interesting one. The copyright laws as they stand are pretty generous, anywhere in the world. Depending on where you live, your work can be protected from anywhere to fifty years after your death to seventy or even eighty; in the United States, the current law is 95 years from creation. That's a long time to continue to make money off of something you did years ago.

So, let's do some math. I wrote Final Exam and published it in January, 2020. If I live for another thirty years, that means that my heirs will have the rights to that book until 2120. That's thirty-one years before the NX-01 Enterprise launches, for you Star Trek fans. Time flies, doesn't it?

But that's the future; it's time to look at the present, as well as the past. For those living in the United States, anything published up to December 31, 1925 is now public domain. That includes a huge number of silent movies, of course, but it also includes a whole bunch of classic pulp stories. The early Lovecraft, for example, is now in public domain. So is a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff, including the majority of the John Carter and Tarzan books. Or at least, the good ones.

But for those in other countries, the bounty of public domain is even bigger. Right now Canada has not yet ratified the new USMCA act, which will change the copyright to 70 years after death from the current 50. So, right now, anything that was written by someone who passed away prior to 1971 is now in the public domain in Canada. That is a lot of great stuff, including a whole bunch of classic pulp writers.

Now, even for the countries with 70-year time frames, the bounty this year is especially juicy. Because 1950 is the cut-off date for those countries, and that was a bumper crop of deceased super-writers. The following men passed away in 1950, which means that their work is now public domain in the vast majority of countries (excluding the US): George Orwell, Rafael Sabatini, George Bernard Shaw, Olaf Stapledon...and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Yes, outside of the US, Tarzan is now public domain.

One of the writers I admire from the pulps is Abraham Merritt. He is a seminal force in the realm of fantastic fiction, having inspired Lovecraft, Howard, Gary Gygax (father of Dungeons & Dragons, for those who don't know), and many others. And he died in 1943, which means his work is public domain in a lot of countries. His first full novel, Conquest of the Moon Pool, was written in 1919, which means it is public domain everywhere, even in the USA.

So, why am I mentioning this? Because Merritt is someone who deserves to be far less obscure than he is now. Even as late as the 1970s, he was a force in fantasy, with his titles being on the spinner racks and book shelves right alongside Tolkien and Burroughs. But he disappeared quite a few years ago. And I want to help bring this gifted author's work back. So, I've been working on a special project: An Abraham Merritt Collection. I'm trying to get the original versions of his works (the ones first published in the pulps, not the edited versions that came later) into book form. Partly it's because I want to have them in hardcopy myself, but also because I'd like other people to see how awesome he was.

I'll have more details on this in the days to come, but the quick version is that I'm going to publish the first Merritt book, an anthology of his short fiction, in the next few days. That doesn't mean I'm not still writing my own stuff; but this is the level of awesome that I'm aspiring to reach through my own work. And I would like to do my part to make these more available to people. Some of his writings aren't available anywhere that I can find.

So, that's my 'secret project.' I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.