London, Jan 2 (ANI): The poetry of WB Yeats and other works of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud will now be available to read on internet for free, as their copyrights have expired.

According to European Union law all books, poems and paintings get into the public domain 70 years after the death of their creator.

The list of writers and thinkers whose works will be available online for free includes Arthur Rackham, the illustrator whose drawings appeared in early versions of children’s books such as Peter Pan and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the novelist Ford Madox Ford, and Howard Carter, the archaeologist who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt.

These works is now available on Wikisource, a sister website of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Andrew Turvey, secretary of Wikimedia UK, said that past experience showed that free access to culture sparks new waves of creativity, as modern artists put their own interpretations on established classics.

“In the internet age it’s so much easier to distribute out-of-copyright material at a marginal cost,” the Telegraph quoted him as saying.

“But digital technology also makes is straightforward for people to create new works inspired by old works. It opens up huge possibilities that did not exist before,” he added.

The copyright expired on the Popeye cartoon character, following the death of the artist Elzie Segar in 1938.

Other works by Mikhail Bulgakov and F Scott Fitzgerald have also been passed into the public domain on New Year’s Day 2011. (ANI)