The copyrights of several pop culture icons, including those for singer Jim Morrison and children's book Winnie-the-Pooh, are set to expire next year.

The Winnie the Pooh and Morrison copyrights, along with those belonging to novelists Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway, singer Mamie Smith, and dozens of others, will be placed in the public domain in the United States. The end of the copyrights means that a single party will no longer own the intellectual rights to those works and that anyone can create or sell merchandise featuring them.

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At the start of every year, a new crop of works enters the public domain. While there is no universal set of laws regulating what is or isn't public domain, U.S. copyright laws place anything printed 96 years ago into the public domain unless the copyright owners seek an extension.

Some companies have been known for regularly seeking extensions to protect their intellectual property. The Walt Disney Company, which owns the merchandising rights to Winnie-the-Pooh, has vigorously defended its right to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain.

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A 2018 law, called the Music Modernization Act, will also go into effect on Jan. 1, 2022, placing more than 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 into the public domain.