It’s the start of a new year, which means a fresh crop of creative works have entered the public domain. Today, many materials that were copyrighted in 1929, along with sound recordings from 1924, become fair game to freely adapt, reuse, copy and share. The Center for Public Domain at Duke Law School collected some of the more notable properties that entered public domain with the start of 2025.
This is a big year when it comes to film, with several seminal directors debuting their first projects with sound, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille’s Dynamite. 1929 was also the year when Walt Disney directed the iconic Skeleton Dance short animated by Ub Iwerks, as well as when Mickey Mouse starred in his first talkie. The intrepid Tintin and original Popeye characters have arrived in the public domain as well.
The compositions for several great songs joined the public domain today. There are memorable show tunes like Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris alongside jazz standards Ain’t Misbehavin’ and (What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue and classical hits like the masterwork Boléro. On the recording side are tracks like George Gershwin’s beautiful Rhapsody in Blue and the legendary singer Marian Anderson’s take on My Way’s Cloudy.
Finally, several authors had titles in the Duke Law roundup. Noir fans will be happy to see Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest here. Other notable literary works now in public domain include A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway, Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. And for the verse lovers, the original German version of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is also on the list.
