I’m having some trouble with the math on this one.

We will all, as of January 1, 2019, have free, unfettered access to Williams’ metafictional shake-up of the formulaic status quo, when “hundreds of thousands of… books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923” enter the public domain, as Glenn Fleishman writes at The Atlantic. Because of the complicated history of U.S. copyright law—especially the 1998 “Sonny Bono Act” that successfully extended a copyright law from 50 to 70 years (for the sake, it’s said, of Mickey Mouse)—it has been twenty years since such a massive trove of material has become available all at once. But now, and “for several decades from 2019 onward,” Fleishman points out, “each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.”

So is it 70 years or 95 years, or does it depend on the type of work? Why can’t I read novels from the 1940s right now? Anyway, the excerpt above is from Open Culture, and has links to many other lists. A couple that catch my eye are one of Agatha Christie’s first novels and some short stories by H.P. Lovecraft.