People come into action after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby’ Entering into Public Domain

Just like every year, many people leave this world and many take birth; several literal works leave the protection and enter the public domain. For those who didn’t understand what are we talking about, it means that the grant of copyright helps in protecting books from replication and adaptation for a certain number of years that further depends on when those books were published. When such copyright gets expires, it allows the creators to adapt or reimagine these works for free without any need to deal with the original authors’ estates.

“And all of the works are free for anyone to use, reuse, build upon for anyone - without paying a fee," Duke University Law Professor Jennifer Jenkins explained in an interview.

Now that we are in the year 2021, copyrights for every book that was published in the year 1925 are lifting and this also includes ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby’. Subsequently, additional perks of expired copyright are that others acquire the ability to publish those books at much cheaper retail rates and also to publish books for free of cost online.

Basically, when copyright is expired then the work automatically falls into the public domain. However, the work in the public domain is considered to be a part of our cultural heritage and gets free from every kind of copyright limitation. In simple language copyright expiration allows anyone to exploit work for both of their commercial and non-commercial gains.

It was undoubtedly no coincidence that author Michael Farris Smith announced about her Nick, a Great Gatsby prequel novel about Nick Carraway getting published a few days from the expiration of Copyright.  It was further coming into the news that new additions to the original novel were being printed by adding fresh introductions by author Min Jin Lee and culture critic Wesley Morris. Then later in January, an illustrated edition from Black Dog & Leventhal was also brought.

Further, the pornographers also take it as an opportunity to take action, and thus, The Gay Gatsby was a name given to a sitter. And the first Gatsby/vampire mashup was also self-published just a day after the novel entered the public domain.

All these acts can be considered as literary theft which is, in some sense, the history of this field of literature itself. Every person should understand that even though the copyright gets expired but the original work should remain in its original form. Added variations by other authors change the image of the characters and also the story which becomes difficult for the readers to decide which one is the real version of an incident.