Beyond the Ick: Public Domain Day 2026 and the Psychology of Closing the Commons

Tomorrow, January 15th, the Royal Library of Belgium will host the annual European Public Domain Day celebrations. Archivists, librarians, legal scholars, and open culture advocates will gather to mark the moment when works from 1954 enter the public domain across Europe. It should be a moment of pure celebration: another year's worth of human creativity becoming freely available for everyone to read, remix, and build upon. But this year, the celebration arrives shadowed by a...