There is/was a basic Magnus Manske tool that searched interwiki to find authors who met the (death year)+X criterion for the first time in 2012 or whenever, according to jurisdiction.

To reply to both this mail and Mike's: WMUK  missed participation in the business of PDD on New Year's  Day 2011; but with a longer lead time for considering what to do that doesn't have to be the case for 2012. There is http://www.publicdomainday.org/ and the chapter ought to find out who is behind that, in concrete terms I think (point 1).

Point 2 is that international copyright law makes the whole business a remarkably tiresome exposition; but there is no reason at all not to document it and have a tool such as Magnus's to demonstrate some aspects of it (illustrating both the global reach of the issue, depending on what languages you read, and the strength of WP as a source of the required data). This is for general interest in terms of the author's life + criterion. There could be press interest in a well-packaged feature proposal about this area, but it would have to be put together in November, really. NB the media interest is not about the wrinkles of free content, but about filling space with something showing originality.

Point 3: American PD. The 2010 experience showed those who participated in the Telegraph story how tight the constraints are for anything to fall into the public domain in the USA. Take this as a challenge, though. The more lawyer-like amongst us could be well employed in researching the very restricted class of new PD material, to see what can be found. I certainly think, at the more specialist end of the market for discussion about free content, this is a worthy little project.

Charles