Tag: Public Domain Day

A public domain for Cinderella

By Katharine Dunn on January 16, 2019

An excerpt from page 112 of A Kiss for Cinderella, public domain via MIT Libraries.

This post is part of the MIT Libraries Public Domain Day celebration. Read the full text of public domain books digitized by the MIT Libraries, explore other volumes, and learn about the public domain at our website.

J.M. Barrie is best known as the creator of Peter Pan, however he also wrote about more traditional characters. His play A Kiss for Cinderella opened on Broadway for Christmas 1916, and our copy of the script was published in 1923 with a copyright date of 1920. The play was adapted into a silent film in 1925.

Barrie’s play is a (then) modern-day take on the classic Cinderella tale and character, which trace their roots far back into cultural history (the earliest known Cinderella tale dates from ~7 BCE). This deep history puts Cinderella into the public domain, which has allowed many authors to build on the story and a allowed the character to become as well known as she is today.

Barrie’s copyright in the play would protect unique aspects he added, but not the well known character or plot.

Wikipedia list of works based on Cinderella

Part of Wikipedia’s list of works based on Cinderella.

Celebrate Public Domain Day with the MIT Libraries

By Katharine Dunn on January 15, 2019

Cover of Military Science and Tactics by MIT, published 1923. Public domain via MIT Libraries.

January 1, 2019, is the first time in 20 years that works published in the U.S. have entered the public domain. Works in the public domain are free for anyone to read and use, and are a vital resource for creators to build from. Did you know that public domain images on Wikipedia, if they were not in the public domain, would cost $246 to $270 million dollars per year? Or that It’s a Wonderful Life became a holiday classic only after entering the public domain accidentally?

Despite the broad value of the public domain, however, copyright durations are extremely long, and have only been getting longer (copyright in works created today last throughout the creator’s life and for 70 years afterward). The most recent extension, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, took effect in 1998 and extended copyright durations for 20 years, freezing the public domain in the process. This year the copyright clock keeps ticking, and works from 1923 are entering the public domain for the first time.

MIT Libraries are celebrating the public domain by digitizing 100 newly public domain books from our collections. Come see the collection and follow our exploration of it on our Public Domain Day website. Wonder what the College Entrance Examination Board algebra requirements, Modern Radio Practice, or possibly Recent Opinions on Modern Vivisection were in 1923? Now you can find out! Throughout the month of January, we will be posting explorations of these books and the public domain itself. Celebrate the public domain with us!

A Journey to India, 1921-1922

By Katharine Dunn on January 14, 2019

Albert Farwell Bemis, A Journey to India, 1923, p. 29. Public domain via the MIT Libraries

A Journey to India, 1921-1922 by Albert Farwell Bemis is an account of a world trip taken by a father and his son about three years after the end of WWI from New York via France, Egypt, India, China, Philippines, and Hawaii back to Boston. Farwell Bemis, a contemporary of Mahatma Gandhi who studied civil engineering at MIT, became a businessman and owned a jute mill an hour north of Kolkata (Calcutta), in Bhadreswar, in West Bengal, India. He is also known as an authority on housing, one who established a trust to fund research on the topic.

The book has insightful observations about travel, co-travelers, economic/industrial development, deep history, and culture. He seems to have thought that industrialization and modernization were inevitable realities despite the efforts of leaders like Gandhi, whom he clearly understood little, to reverse their adverse consequences: “I took a hurried trip to Bombay to see something of the cotton industry, at present the most prosperous of all Indian industries owing to the Gandhi-ites’ Swadeshi [referring to Hind Swaraj, Indian Home Rule] propaganda.” (p. 36)

He is overall a thoughtful traveler who advises his fellow Americans to “let us devote ourselves to our own industrial problems, our own racial problems, involving negroes, American Indians, and immigrants of countless races, and our own political problems, before attempting to tell other nationalities how to run their affairs.” (p. 55)

A language lesson

By Katharine Dunn on January 10, 2019

Italian Folk Tales and Folk Songs / Frederick A.G. Cowper / inside cover. Public domain via the MIT Libraries

I struggle when it comes to learning languages. I took Latin and French in high school, and minored in German in college. In graduate school, I passed a language test in German to earn my MA in art history, but that was just by the skin of my teeth, or in German, mit Ach und Krach, which Google translates as “with awesome noise.”

Regardless, if there was a language I was going to torture myself with these days, I think it would be Italian. It was with this very vague interest in mind that I found myself drawn to the title Italian Folk Tales and Folk Songs by Frederick A.G. Cowper. When you open the book, the first thing you see is a drawn bookplate stating that this book is from the library of Kenneth L. Hale. The drawing seems to be the head of a wolf, and I’m guessing there is meaning there, probably linked to folk tales.

I was excited to see that this book belonged to Hale because in the MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections (IASC), there is a collection of Hale’s material (MC-0523). Hale, 1934-2001, was a professor in the Department of Linguistics at MIT from 1966 to 2001. He performed extensive fieldwork beginning in the 1950s, specializing in linguistic theory, Amerindian languages, and Australian languages. In addition to studying Native American and Aboriginal Australian languages, Hale was actively involved in causes promoting the preservation of endangered languages and cultures.

Italian Folk Tales and Folk Songs / Frederick A.G. Cowper / page 10. Public domain via the MIT Libraries

Correspondence from Bill Bright to Ken Hale with handwritten Hale reply, Correspondence “B”, Kenneth L. Hale Papers, MC 523, box 1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Looking further into the book, I noticed a lot of translating notes handwritten on the pages. I wondered if these were by Hale, or by someone else, either before Hale owned it, or after it went to the MIT Libraries. Comparing the handwriting to an example from his correspondence, I do not think he made the notes in the book. I am not a handwriting expert, so I would love to hear others opinions, but looking specifically at the big loops in his d’s and l’s in the correspondence, I did not see anything similar in the book.

Overall, this looks like a fun book, and a neat way to learn a language. It helps that some of the translating work has already been done for you!