It’s the start of a new year, which means new creative works have entered the public domain. Today, much of the material copyrighted in 1929, along with the recordings from 1924, can rightfully be freely modified, reused, copied, and shared. The Public Domain Center at Duke Law School has collected several notable assets that entered the public domain in early 2025.
This year has been a big one for film, with several seminal directors debuting their first projects using sound, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille’s Dynamite. Ta. 1929 was also the year that Walt Disney directed Ubu Iwerks’ iconic animated short, The Skeleton Dance, and the year that Mickey Mouse starred in his first talkie film. The original characters of the brave Tintin and Popeye also appeared in the public domain.
Some great song compositions have entered the public domain today. Memorable show tunes such as “Singin’ in the Rain” and “An American in Paris,” as well as jazz standards “Ain’t Misbehavin'” and “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue,” And then there are the classic hits, like the masterpiece “Boléro.” The recording side includes tracks such as George Gershwin’s beautiful “Rhapsody in Blue” and legendary singer Marian Anderson’s “Cloudy” from “My Way.”
Finally, several authors have titled their Duke Law compendiums. Fans of noir will be happy to see Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest here. Other notable literary works currently in the public domain include Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dial Mystery. and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. And for lovers of poetry, the original German version of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is also on the list.
