In Canada, copyright protection for most types of works lasts for 50 years after the end of the year in which the creator dies. When copyright expires, those works enter the public domain, meaning there are no longer any restrictions on their use. Please note that other countries may have different lengths of copyright protection (e.g. the United States), so works in the public domain in Canada will not necessarily be unrestricted to freely use elsewhere.
Works created by authors, artists and other types of creators who died in 1965 entered the public domain in Canada on January 1 of this year. These include:
- T.S. Eliot
- Winston Churchill
- Nat King Cole
- Malcolm X
- Adlai Stevenson
- Shirley Jackson
- Le Corbusier
- Dorothea Lange
- W. Somerset Maugham
- Martin Buber
For more information about copyright and the public domain, see the FAQ "What is the "public domain" and can I copy works from the public domain freely?" and the Copyright at SFU website. For more information about authors and creators whose works enter the public domain in Canada this year, see this Wikilivres page and this Public Domain Review page.
Contact the Copyright Office at copy@sfu.ca with any questions about copyright, including the public domain.
Note: The information obtained from or through this website is provided as guidelines for using works for educational purposes and is not intended to constitute legal advice. Contact copy@sfu.ca with any questions. The Copyright Officer is not a lawyer or legal expert in copyright law and is able to provide a professional and not a legal opinion. A professional opinion is offered for information purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal advice.
This work, the Simon Fraser University Copyright website, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License unless otherwise noted.