[1] In 2011, it celebrated the public domain status of Isaac Babel, Walter Benjamin, John Buchan, Mikhail Bulgakov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Emma Goldman, Paul Klee, Selma Lagerlöf, Leon Trotsky, Vito Volterra, Nathanael West, and others.

[10] Significant materials entering the public domain in 2021 included: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, Franz Kafka's The Trial, and the jazz standard "Sweet Georgia Brown".

[13] Public Domain Day events have been hosted on various dates in Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Israel.

[16][17] In January 2012, a celebration was announced in Warsaw, Poland,[18] and for the first time in Kraków,[19] where for several years on that day various activities have been organized by free culture NGOs (such as Koalicja Otwartej Edukacji and Open Society Institute) and other supporters.

[25] Several activities were carried to celebrate the event, including a special section at the MIT Libraries for public domain works[26] and the "Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain"[27] that took place at the Internet Archive with the presence of members of Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation, among other scholars like Pam Samuelson, Lawrence Lessig and James Boyle.

[citation needed] In 2022 in the United States, in addition to works published in 1926 that had had their copyright renewed, about 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 also passed into the public domain under the CLASSICS Act.

This included the animated short film Steamboat Willie, featuring Mickey Mouse, a subject of significant copyright interest.