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Duke Law, Center for the Study of the Public Domain – On January 1, 2021, copyrighted works from 1925 will enter the US public domain,1 where they will be free for all to use and build upon. These works include books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (in the original German), silent films featuring Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and music ranging from the jazz standard Sweet Georgia Brown to songs by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, W.C. Handy, and Fats Waller. This is not just the famous last line from The Great Gatsby. It also encapsulates what the public domain is all about. A culture is a continuing conversation between present and past. On Public Domain Day, we all have a “green light,” in keeping with the Gatsby theme, to use one more year of that rich cultural past, without permission or fee. Works from 1925 were supposed to go into the public domain in 2001, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years.2 Now the wait is over. In 2021, there is a lot to celebrate. 1925 brought us some incredible culture. The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. The New Yorker magazine was founded. The literature reflected both a booming economy, whose fruits were unevenly distributed, and the lingering upheaval and tragedy of World War I. The culture of the time reflected all of those contradictory tendencies. The BBC’s Culture website suggested that 1925 might be “the greatest year for books ever,” and with good reason. It is not simply the vast array of famous titles. The stylistic innovations produced by books such as Gatsby, or The Trial, or Mrs. Dalloway marked a change in both the tone and the substance of our literary culture, a broadening of the range of possibilities available to writers, while characters such as Jay Gatsby, Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and Clarissa Dalloway still resonate today.
How will people celebrate this trove of cultural material? The Internet Archive will add books, movies, music, and more to its online library. HathiTrust will make tens of thousands of titles from 1925 available in its digital repository. Google Books will offer the full text of books from that year, instead of showing only snippet views or authorized previews. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can afford to publicly perform, or rearrange, the music. Educators and historians can share the full cultural record. Creators can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs. Here are some of the works that will be entering the public domain in 2021. (To find more material from 1925, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.)…”
Klinefelter, Anne, The Value of an Academic Law Library in the 21st Century (2020). pp. 3-20, in ACADEMIC LAW LIBRARIES WITHIN THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF LEGAL EDUCATION: A PRIMER FOR DEANS AND PROVOSTS, (Joan S. Howland, Michelle Wu, Ronald E. Wheeler, and Scott Pagel, eds., Hein, American Association of Law Libraries Publication Series #84, 2020, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3734447
“Law school deans and university provosts may ask how law libraries can deliver value as new technologies, practices, and economic pressures inspire reassessment of legal education and of higher education more generally. The proliferation of information delivery systems, trends towards centralized management of higher education infrastructure, and changes in the law practice market suggest that the traditional law library may not meet current needs.
But law libraries have the potential and opportunity to deliver strong value in this environment due largely to the sophistication of today’s law librarians. The law library can be a center for expertise that can advance law school and university goals with vision and efficiency.
New York Times op-ed: Christmas Turns the World Upside Down, by Peter Wehner (Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center; co-author, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era):
Those of us of the Christian faith believe that Christmas Day represents the moment of God’s incarnation, when this broken world became his home. But it was not an entrance characterized by privilege, comfort, public celebration or self-glorification; it was marked instead by lowliness, obscurity, humility, fragility. ...
That could be said not just about Jesus’ birth but also his entire life, which was in many respects an inversion of what the world, including much of the Christian world, prizes. ...
The paradox is that Christianity changed the world despite Jesus’ declaration that his kingdom was not of this world. His disciples did not have notable worldly status or influence. Jesus’ energies and affections were primarily aimed toward social outcasts, the downtrodden and “unclean,” strangers and aliens, prostitutes and the powerless. The people Jesus clashed with and who eventually crucified him were religious authorities and those who wielded political power. The humble will be exalted, Jesus said, and the last shall be first. True greatness is shown through serving others and sacrifice.
All of this calls to mind an account in II Corinthians, one I have been intrigued by for nearly as long as I have been a Christian. In his epistle, Paul is describing a “thorn in my flesh” that was tormenting him. (We don’t know specifically what it was.) Three times he beseeched the Lord to remove it, according to the apostle, to which Jesus replied, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul went on to add, “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
What does it mean for God’s power to be made perfect in weakness?
It’s a statement as much about us as it is about God. Most of us know that we often grow in times of weakness rather than strength, when we face hardship rather than experience success. ...