New Year’s Eve, among its other distinctions, is the date when copyright terms tend to expire: with the beginning of each new year, at least in this country, the public domain gets a little larger. In 2012, this has had a couple of effects in the world of digital bookchat.
One was a flurry of insulting tweets directed at Stephen Joyce, who has policed quotation of his grandfather James’s work with more vigour than many scholars would like. Since the elder Joyce died in 1941, and copyright expires in most places 70 years after the death of the author, the younger Joyce has now lost his grip on Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, although graduate students tempted to hit the retweet button should remember that the situation is much more complicated with works not published during the creator’s lifetime.
The other effect has been the circulation of an elegiac list published by the Center
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