Thanks to the public domain, Tintin can now dance to “Rhapsody in Blue.”
It’s the start of a new year, which means a new batch of creative works have entered the public domain. Today, many materials copyrighted in 1929, as well as sound recordings from 1924, are fair game for free editing, reuse, reproduction, and distribution. The Center for the Public Domain at Duke Law School collected some of the more notable properties to enter the public domain in early 2025.
This is a big year for film, with several groundbreaking directors debuting their first projects with sound, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s blackmail and Cecil B. DeMilles dynamite. 1929 was also the year Walt Disney directed the cult film Skeleton dance Short film by Ub Iwerks, when Mickey Mouse also starred in his first sound film. The Intrepid Tintin characters and the original Popeye characters have also entered the public domain.
The compositions for several great songs have now entered the public domain. There are unforgettable show tunes like Singing in the rain And An American in Paris alongside jazz standards It’s not bad behavior And (What have I done to be like this) Black and blue and classic hits like the masterpiece bolero. On the recording side, titles like George Gershwin’s are beautiful Rhapsody in Blue and the interpretation of the legendary singer Marian Anderson My path is cloudy.
Finally, several authors had titles in the Duke Law summary. Noir fans will enjoy Dashiell Hammetts The Maltese Falcon And Red Harvest Here. Other notable literary works now in the public domain include: A room for yourself by Virginia Woolf, A farewell to weapons by Ernest Hemmingway, Seven Dials Mystery 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.
