“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” This is not just the famous last line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It also captures the essence of the ‘public domain’ — an imaginary common ground on which unfolds conversations between the present and the past.

Today is Public Domain Day. On January 1 every year, works of art become legally available to the public based on the copyright laws of each country. And 2021 is likely to give bibliophiles an adrenaline rush; The Great Gatsby, Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) and The Trial (Franz Kafka) will — finally — enter the public domain today.

Such accessibility can have a range of consequences. It may add to the legacy of a book just like Wide Sargasso Sea did for Jane Eyre or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead did for Hamlet; it could also open the door to editions that change the fate of the original text for the worse Scarlett, a sequel to Gone with the Wind must have had the original Scarlett O’Hara turn as red in the face as her name. But the public domain can also give writers and readers an opportunity to explore lingering questions that beloved classics have raised. For instance, in The Great Gatsby, right before Nick Carraway, the narrator, gets into a car with the antagonist, Tom Buchanan — a journey that led to the novel’s tragic end — Carraway realizes that he has forgotten his own birthday. This detail stuck with Michael Farris Smith: what could make a man so detached from himself that he does not remember his own birthday? This is a query that Smith explores in his new novel, Nick.

Works in the public domain also help us nitpick with classics; for even beloved authors can make us cringe by pandering to misogyny, racism and other such warts. In Journal de L, a reworked version of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Christophe Tison makes Lolita, a 12-year-old, voice her anxieties about being the object of affection of the middle-aged Humbert Humbert.

But there is a more important question: are works protected by copyright really safe, or even out of reach? The Digital Age has led to the flowering of sequels — a genre called ‘fan fiction’ — in the uncontrolled world of the internet. Even a cursory Google search would reveal thousands of fan blogs with imaginative retellings of classics both in and out of the public domain — from Pride and Prejudice to the Harry Potter series. Then, there are also the ‘pirates’. Restricted access to originals also leads to another — uglier — bloom: many a website uploads pirated copies of books almost as soon as they are published, robbing authors of royalty.

Books in the public domain continue to fire the imagination — even though the outcome might not always be pleasing — while outdated copyright laws target
academics quoting from copyrighted texts without attribution and teachers making photocopies of books.