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It was a bright cold December evening, and the clocks were striking eleven. George Orwell’s “1984” came out of copyright one hour later.
The copyright should have expired in the UK twenty years ago, but it was retrospectively extended in 1995 to bring Britain up to German standards of industrial protection (or, as some might have it, to lower Britain down to German standards of consumer protection).
I have been interested in the copyright on Orwell and FM Cornford’s works for a long time as I produced a book of essays containing some of their work. I have never been able to publish that book due to retrospective copyright extension; Cornford, who used to live on my street, died in 1943, so his work was briefly out of copyright in the mid-1990s; a galley proof of my book was produced in 2014 when Cornford’s work returned to the public domain.
The 1995-ish law extending copyright is one of the very few EU laws which has been subjected to rigorous economic analyses; mostly this is impossible because disentangling the effects of complex laws is infeasible, but retrospective copyright extension is a pure rent grant affecting a well-identified aftermarket, and so it was possible to analyse the effects isolation. The UK of course went along with the law at the time, making it part of the UK’s own statutes.
Accordingly, for a single hour, Orwell’s works were in copyright in the UK by virtue of the continuing effect of EU-originated law: the UK left the so-called Single Market at 11pm on New Year’s Eve and the copyright expired at midnight; the discrepancy arises due to the time difference between Rome and Greenwich.
Given that it is currently illegal for groups of six people to meet in public in the UK, for the first time since 1824, and the doublethink and doublespeak on all sides of the EU and copyright debates, I find this all fittingly ironic.