Hiya Phoebe,
For me, the big issue with preventing 20 years worth of material going into the public domain is that it probably hindered a lot of creative activity, and also denied corporations from deriving benefit from new creations. So if I was going to do a public domain editathon, in addition to creating/enhancing articles on the issues, I would select articles that show works' dependency of previous works - part of the nature and cycle of creation. Think jazz. Looking at the article
1923 in music, I see pop songs lacking articles such as "Milenberg Joys," "My Sweetie Went Away" and "Some Sweet Day." All of these songs were covered by others. "Milenberg Joys"
in particular became a well-kinown jazz standard - I'm surprised there's not an article on it already.
There's already an article on the song "Charleston" which was a major hit and is still occasionally used in film and tv to denote the 1920s. But there's no article on the musical from which it comes, "Runnin' Wild." I note that the composer of this show was the African American composer James P. Johnson - it was still pretty rare for such a composer to have a Broadway show. With Black History Month around the corner, it might make a good project.
I know Duke's Public Domain Project has links to lots of articles. It would be nice if Wikipedia could have an article entitled like "How the public domain enhances the economy."
Good luck!
All the best,
Bob
Bob Kosovsky, Ph.D. -- Curator, Rare Books and Manuscripts,
Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
blog:
http://www.nypl.org/blog/author/44 Twitter: @kos2
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