There ensued a whole bunch of smartass comments with spoilers of very old works. My contribution was "On The seventh day He rested." In terms of serious responses, I recall one person saying that, for modern works, one year is sufficient.
But I think a lot of it depends on context beyond how old a work is. Take, for example, the 1941 film classic, Citizen Kane. In most situations it's perfectly OK to give away the ending. Julie Brown even worked it into her song "Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun."
But if you're in a theatre, about to watch the movie, assume no one knows the ending. THis is a fact of life in the cinema history class Ethan and I take. We're watching movies that are decades old. In some cases they're almost a hundred years old. But the rule is clear: no spoilers. We can be total dumbasses in many other ways, screaming out stupid comments and random references to Pittsburgh as if we were a roomful of Tom Servos. But no spoilers. And I especially appreciated that last week, when we saw Psycho. For me, it was the first time, and most of the guys had seen it before. I could see them practically bursting as I would guess at what was going on -- "Does he have some kind of weird split personality thing going on?" "Uhh...you'll see."
But, absent a specific context that changes things, I can buy the idea of giving it a year.
