Celebrate the New Year with a happy Public Domain Day!

Happy New Year, everyone!  Welcome aboard, 2025!

And what better way to celebrate the new year then to recognize a whole slew of cultural objects just entered the public domain?  Yes, books, movies, and more from 1929 (and audio recordings from 1924) just left copyright as of this very day, according to United States law.  Other titles enter public domain from different years, depending on national laws (see below). So today is officially Public Domain Day.

Here are some examples of what’s now in the PD, assembled by, described by, and quoted from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Books:

• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
• Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon (as serialized in Black Mask magazine)
• John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold (Steinbeck’s first novel)
• Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
• Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story
• Patrick Hamilton, Rope
• Arthur Wesley Wheen, the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• Agatha Christie, Seven Dials Mystery
• Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That
• E. B. White and James Thurber, Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (only the original German version, Briefe an einen jungen Dichter)

Movies:

• A dozen more Mickey Mouse animations (including Mickey’s first talking appearance in The Karnival Kid)
• The Cocoanuts, directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley (the first Marx Brothers feature film)
• The Broadway Melody, directed by Harry Beaumont (winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture)
• The Hollywood Revue of 1929, directed by Charles Reisner (featuring the song “Singin’ in the Rain”)
• The Skeleton Dance, directed by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks (the first Silly Symphony short from Disney)
• Blackmail, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock’s first sound film)
• Hallelujah, directed by King Vidor (one of the first film from a major studio with an all African-American cast)
• The Wild Party, directed by Dorothy Arzner (Clara Bow’s first “talkie”)
• Welcome Danger, directed by Clyde Bruckman and Malcolm St. Clair (the first full-sound comedy starring Harold Lloyd)
• On With the Show, directed by Alan Crosland (the first all-talking, all-color, feature-length film)
• Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora), directed by G.W. Pabst
• Show Boat, directed by Harry A. Pollard (adaptation of the novel and musical)
• The Black Watch, directed by John Ford (Ford’s first sound film)
• Spite Marriage, directed by Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton (Keaton’s final silent feature)
• Say It with Songs, directed by Lloyd Bacon (follow-up to The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool)
• Dynamite, directed by Cecil B. DeMille (DeMille’s first sound film)
• Gold Diggers of Broadway, directed Roy Del Ruth

Music:

• Singin’ in the Rain, lyrics by Arthur Freed, music by Nacio Herb Brown
• Ain’t Misbehavin’, lyrics by Andy Paul Razaf, music by Thomas W. (“Fats”) Waller & Harry Brooks (from the musical Hot Chocolates)
• An American in Paris, George Gershwin
• Boléro, Maurice Ravel
• (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue, lyrics by Andy Paul Razaf, music by Thomas W. “Fats” Waller & Harry Brooks (a song about racial injustice from the musical Hot Chocolates)
• Tiptoe Through the Tulips, lyrics by Alfred Dubin, music by Joseph Burke
• Happy Days Are Here Again, lyrics by Jack Yellen, music by Milton Ager (the theme song for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign)
• What Is This Thing Called Love?, by Cole Porter (from Porter’s musical Wake Up and Dream)
• Am I Blue?, lyrics by Grant Clarke, music by Harry Akst
• You Were Meant for Me, lyrics by Arthur Freed, music by Nacio Herb Brown
• Honey, lyrics and music by Seymour Simons, Haven Gillespie, and Richard A. Whiting
• Waiting for a Train, lyrics and music by Jimmie Rodgers

Audio recordings:

• My Way’s Cloudy, recorded by Marian Anderson
• Rhapsody in Blue, recorded by George Gershwin
• Shreveport Stomp, recorded by Jelly Roll Morton
• Lazy, recorded by The Georgians
• Krooked Blues, recorded by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band featuring Louis Armstrong
• Deep Blue Sea Blues, recorded by Clara Smith
• The Gouge of Armour Avenue, recorded by Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra featuring Big Charlie Green
• Mama’s Gone, Good Bye, recorded by Ray Miller and his Orchestra
• It Had To Be You, recorded by the Isham Jones Orchestra and by Marion Harris
• California Here I Come, recorded by Al Jolson

And two beloved characters:

• E. C. Segar, Popeye (in “Gobs of Work” from the Thimble Theatre comic strip). Here’s the first appearance:

• Hergé (Georges Remi), Tintin (in “Les Aventures de Tintin” from the magazine Le Petit Vingtième)

Here’s another list of materials entering public domain in the US. And the same page lists cases for other countries, since copyright law can vary nationally.  For example, as the Public Domain Review describes,

• works by people who died in 1954, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (e.g. UK, Russia, most of EU and South America);
• works by people who died in 1974, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (e.g. New Zealand, and most of Africa and Asia);

Now, because these materials are out of copyright, anyone can make use of them.  You can alter, remix, repost, or otherwise have at ’em.  There are even PD contests, like this game jam (“Gaming Like It’s 1929”) and the Internet Archive’s video remix contest.

Enjoy!

(Robert Graves book cover by “It is believed that the cover art can or could be obtained from Anchor., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6576431”)