what happens when an authors purpose was to openly advance anything he wrote as I could argue mathematicians like Einstein intrnded
You can argue that Einstein (and many scientists/mathematicians) intended their work to advance human knowledge freely and that they personally wanted it to be as widely disseminated as possible — and you would be 100% correct in Einstein’s case.However, that personal intention does not override or shorten statutory copyright term under UK law (or almost any other country’s law). Here’s why:
Even though Einstein would almost certainly be delighted that from 1 January 2026 everyone can use, reprint, translate, and remix every word he ever wrote without permission or payment, the law did not allow his good intentions alone to make that happen sooner. In UK law (and EU, and most of the world), the clock only stops 70 years after the author’s death — full stop.So yes, in just a few weeks his papers become legally free for everyone forever, but it happens because of the calendar, not because of Einstein’s generosity or his scientific ethos. The law simply doesn’t have a special “noble intent” exception.
- Copyright arises automatically
In the UK and virtually every Berne Convention country, copyright exists the moment a work is fixed in a tangible form. The author does not have to register it, assert it, or want it. It just exists for the full legal term. - Moral intentions vs legal reality
An author can say “I want everyone to use this freely forever” (and Einstein effectively did say things very close to that), but unless they took active legal steps at the time, the default copyright term still applies.
Einstein published his 1905–1955 papers in the usual way through journals (Annalen der Physik, Physical Review, etc.). Those journals required him to transfer or license certain rights, and neither he nor the journals released the papers under any kind of public-domain dedication or open licence that existed back then. - Ways an author could have made it free immediately
- Explicitly dedicate the work to the public domain (almost impossible before Creative Commons existed in 2001; the legal mechanism was unclear in most countries).
- Publish under a permissive licence (didn’t exist for academic papers in Einstein’s era).
- Never publish at all and just circulate preprints (obviously defeats the purpose).
Einstein did none of these in a legally effective way.
- What actually happened with Einstein’s estate
After his death in 1955, Einstein left his literary rights (copyrights in his papers, letters, etc.) to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The estate and the university have actively enforced and licensed those copyrights for the last 70 years (books, quotations, image rights, etc.). They never chose to release the scientific papers into the public domain early.
Even though Einstein would almost certainly be delighted that from 1 January 2026 everyone can use, reprint, translate, and remix every word he ever wrote without permission or payment, the law did not allow his good intentions alone to make that happen sooner. In UK law (and EU, and most of the world), the clock only stops 70 years after the author’s death — full stop.So yes, in just a few weeks his papers become legally free for everyone forever, but it happens because of the calendar, not because of Einstein’s generosity or his scientific ethos. The law simply doesn’t have a special “noble intent” exception.
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