Literary works are protected by U.S. copyright laws for up to 95 years, which means anything written before 1926 is in the public domain.
Well-known works entering the public domain on January 1, 2021, include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and songs by Duke Ellington, among others.
That means you can now quote from Gatsby to your heart’s content, beyond the bounds of “fair use,” without paying these guys.
I can’t tell you how many Gatsby quotes I plowed through before picking these two. Naturally, Fitzgerald’s epitaph had to be one of them. The other selection is arbitrary.
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