When I heard about the recent adaptation of Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro, I absolutely had to see it at some point.
The novel has been a talking point among my poetry circle, the Wyverns, since we released a released a pamphlet with the theme of Frankenstein in 2018. There is a local connection in that Mary Shelley was living in Dundee when she started writing it.
For literature in the UK and EU, a work remains in copyright for 70 years after the death of the author. Even if that law had been around in 1851, Frankenstein is still squarely into the public domain, so any director is allowed complete artistic freedom. The consensus seems to be that this version is faithful to the spirit of the novel, but not the details.
If Mary Shelley somehow arrived in our time and was able to watch this, I think she would be impressed.
But copyright law varies by juristiction and by type of work. In 1998, the US passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This extended the copyright of works authored by corporations, meaning they wouldn’t become public domain until 95 years after the date of their creation.
The legislation was named after the late Sonny Bono, who believed that copyright should be in perpetuity. However, the true beneficiary is widely thought to be The Walt Disney Company. Only within the last two years has its first creation – Mickey Mouse – fallen into the public domain, and we can expect to see more following suit over the coming decades.
In the literary world, novels from the middle of the 20th century novels are beginning to fall out of copyright. A prime example is Nineteen Eighty-Four because George Orwell died in 1950, just two years after its publication.
Wikipedia maintains pages about works that will become public domain in 2026, and if you fancy reading some of these, they might be available on the Gutenberg Project website.
Gavin Cameron 