The Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a list of a few books, including Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, that should have entered the public domain in America on January 1, 2010:

* Agatha Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye
* Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March
* Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451
* John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest
* C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (the fourth book in The Chronicles of Narnia)
* J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories
* Leon Uris’s Battle Cry
* James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain
* Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying

Movies like Hondo, Peter Pan, and Glen or Glenda should be entering the public domain, too. Instead, thanks to the 1976 Copyright Act, absolutely no new books or movies entered the public domain in America this year, and we won't see any new public domain works until at least 2019. Public domain, in many ways, is the fountain that refreshes our culture, and a few select megacorporations, especially Disney, are blocking access to all works because they need to maintain copyright on their intellectual properties.

From folk tales to work songs, the story of humanity is told by the public domain. If this shameless monetizing of our imagination continues like this, we'll be completely choking to death on our nostalgia by 2015, when they remake Starsky and Hutch for the eleventy-billionth time. Pro-copyright apologists may scoff and say that creatives simply need to come up with new ideas, but it's not that simple. Storytelling is always a group effort, even if it's as seemingly solitary an act as writing a novel. This domination of ideas is quite simply unhealthy and wrong. You can read more about the public domain here.

(Via Third Place Books Press.)