Public domain, where there is life after copyright
For nearly four decades, United Airlines licensed George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" to be its musical identity. In 2020, however, Gershwin's jazzy classical classic fell out of the friendly skies – and landed in the public domain.Which means, when the copyright expires, anyone is free to use and build upon that work. "No fees, no licenses, no tracking down the person who owns it, no permission," said Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University Law School. She said there are a lot of famous works that don't belong to their creators anymore – films like Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus," and Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," books like Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," and characters like Peter Pan, Dracula and Frankenstein. They're all now...
