It’s the start of a new year, which means a new crop of creative works has entered the public domain. Today, many materials copyrighted in 1929, as well as sound recordings from 1924, become fair game that can be freely adapted, reused, copied and shared. The Public Realm Center at Duke Law School collection some of the most notable properties entering the public domain in early 2025.
It’s a big year in terms of cinema, with several notable directors debuting their first projects with sound, such as that of Alfred Hitchcock. Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille Dynamite. 1929 is also the year that Walt Disney made the iconic Skeleton Dance short animated film by Ub Iwerks, as well as when Mickey Mouse starred in his first talking movie. The intrepid characters of the original Tintin and Popeye have also arrived in the public domain.
The compositions of several great songs have entered the public domain today. There are memorable show tunes like Singing in the rain And An American in Paris alongside jazz standards There is no such thing as bad behavior And (What did I do to be this way) Black and blue and classic hits like the masterpiece Bolero. On the recording side, we find pieces like the magnificent Rhapsody in Blue and the version of the legendary singer Marian Anderson My path is cloudy.
Finally, several authors had titles in Duke Law Review. Noir fans will be happy to see Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon And Red Harvest here. Other notable literary works now in the public domain include A room of one’s own by Virginie Woolf, A farewell to arms by Ernest Hemmingway, Mystery of the seven dials by Agatha Christie and The sound and the fury by William Faulkner. And for verse lovers, the original German version by Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a young poet is also on the list.
