What child has not sat starry-eyed around the fire, dreaming of the goodies to come on January 1—Public Domain Day? The thought of new books and movies and music coming out from copyright is enough to send sugarplums dancing through heads, unless you live in the US in 2010. In which case, you have nothing to celebrate, since nothing is entering the public domain this year.

Thanks to various copyright terms extensions over the last four decades, the US is living in the midst of a public domain "donut hole" under which no important works will come out of copyright protection. Before the 1976 Copyright Act reforms, copyright in the US lasted for 28 years, with another 28 if an extension was applied for. Under the old regime, works from 1953 would have entered the public domain this week, works like C.S. Lewis' The Silver Chair and Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.

But the 1976 copyright reforms extended copyright, and 1998's so-called "Mickey Mouse" term extension went even further. Thanks to those laws, much pre-1976 material that is not already in the public domain was granted a 95-year period of copyright protection; books published since now have life+70 protection.

The end result is a gap in which no major works will enter the public domain in the US. Librarian John Mark Ockerbloom calls it a "public domain freeze" and says that "no copyrights of published works will expire here in the US due to age for another nine years, at least."

Duke University's Center for the Public Domain also lamented what might have been this week with a long post on how the public domain would have been enriched in 2010 by the addition of Casino Royale and the first issue of Playboy—now locked up for another few decades thanks to retroactive term extensions.

This isn't just about making popular works available for free, either. The vast majority of creative material has a shelf life of months (or less), and only about 15 percent of all copyrighted works were renewed under the pre-1976 law. As the Center points out, this means that 85 percent of copyrighted material from 1981 would have entered the public domain on January 1, 2010 were it not for the rule change.

A staggering amount of "orphaned" content is tied up under copyright law, but freeing it is not simple. Congress has been taking a whack at it, though orphan works legislation is on the back burner for the moment.

In Europe, despite a set of recent term extensions, material did enter the public domain this week. A rough list is available from Public Domain Works, based on authors dying in 1939 (70 years ago). If any of our European readers ever wanted open access to William Basil Worsfold's 1893 work A Visit To Java: With An Account Of The Founding Of Singapore... well, 2010 should be a very good year.