As every year, Public Domain Day was celebrated on January 1st. With the new year, thousands of works whose copyright term expired during the previous year became part of the common cultural heritage.

Once they enter the public domain, works can be digitized and made available online, re-edited, or used to create derivative works, among other things, without the need to ask for permission. This freedom to distribute and remix works generates significant benefits by making culture more accessible and vibrant.

The Berne Convention establishes a 50-year period after the death of authors for works to enter the public domain. Unfortunately, in recent decades many Latin American countries have extended this period to 70 or more years post-mortem, thus reducing the public domain and, consequently, the portion of cultural heritage that is freely accessible. You can consult the copyright term of each country.

Taking into account the copyright term of each Latin American country, the following authors, among others, entered the public domain in their respective countries this year: the Brazilian sculptor Victor Brecheret, the Colombian painter Andrés de Santa María, the Mexican educator and revolutionary Dolores Jiménez y Muro, the Uruguayan poet Líber Falco, the Colombian writer María Margarita Fonseca Silvestre, the Argentine sculptor Mateo Rufino Alonso, the Mexican writer and teacher María Ernestina Larráinzar Córdoba, the Colombian composer Luis Antonio Calvo, the Bolivian painter and muralist Miguel Alandia Pantoja, the Cuban painter María Pepa Lamarque, the Chilean architect Alberto Cruz Montt, and the Chilean writer Mariano Latorre (the works of Cruz Montt and Latorre, strictly speaking, entered the public domain a few months earlier, in August and November 2025 respectively, since in Chile, unlike other countries, the term is calculated from the exact day of the author’s death.) A more comprehensive list of Latin American authors whose works entered the public domain can be found in this link.

Strengthening the Latin American public domain with Wikidata

Since mid-2025, a group of Wikimedia chapters, user groups and organizations in the region have come together to promote the regional project “Strengthening the Latin American Public Domain with Wikidata”. The project involves working collaboratively with volunteers and heritage institutions to provide data on the region’s cultural heritage and thus reduce the knowledge gaps that still persist. It is driven by Wikimedia Chile, Wikimedia Colombia, Wikimedia Mexico, Wikimedistas de Uruguay, Fundación Conector and Ártica.

As part of the project, we are conducting an online course on Wikidata and the public domain aimed at members of chapters and user groups in the region. We are also organizing local workshops in four countries in the region (Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay), we are adding new features to the Paulina tool ―a Wikidata-based tool for discovering and accessing cultural heritage,― we are creating educational resources about data and the public domain, and developing and implementing an ontology for describing people and works in the public domain. We also maintain the WikiProject Public Domain in Latin America, and we promote editing campaigns on Wikidata to improve the representation of Latin American authors and works and help identify whether they are in the public domain.

During the last months of 2025, we were also collaborating with the international campaign Wiki Loves Public Domain, which focused on providing data on the works and authors that entered the public domain on January 1, 2026.

In summary, we believe Wikidata is an excellent tool for addressing knowledge gaps regarding cultural heritage in countries of the Global Majority (as a more precise concept than Global South which better describes the number of inhabitants of the world). We encourage you to join these efforts or replicate them in your own regions.

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