Amidst all of the horror, tedium and confusion that has accompanied the beginning of 2021, there is one small glimmer of good news: (much of) the work of George Orwell has come out of copyright, 71 years after his premature death at the age of 46. By way of contrast, the works of PG Wodehouse remain in the clutches of its literary estate until 2045, and even the books of that quintessential Edwardian novelist EM Forster will lurk in copyright until 2040, somewhat unbelievably. But if any enterprising film studio fancies producing a new film of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm or even Down and out in Paris and London, they can now do so, gratis. And, on a smaller level, any opportunistic chancer could potentially make a few pounds by dashing off their own 500-word introduction to one of Orwell’s books, putting it on Amazon as a download, and (potentially) reaping the profits.
Of course, the release of the Orwell estate from copyright isn’t quite as straightforward as it might appear. As his biographer DJ Taylor notes in this typically thorough article, different US and UK laws mean that American publishers and filmmakers must wait another decade before they can even begin using his work freely, and many of the posthumous letters, essays and revised versions of the novels, published long after Orwell’s death, will remain in one form of copyright or another for decades. So, the original editions of the novels and essays published in Orwell’s lifetime will be fair game, in Britain at least, but everything else he wrote should be approached with a degree of caution. The uninformed might even call such a situation “Orwellian”, if they believed that a mild degree of confusion when it comes to copyright laws can really be compared to the totalitarian state so memorably described in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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