Hello, everyone! 😎
If you don't know (and if you do, I'd like to remind you 😜), New Year's Day was also Public Domain Day 2025. This means that under current US law, 95 years after their creation, films, books, comics, illustrations, and all the characters from these works published in 1929 have been put into the public domain.
Source: Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, Directors, Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, CC BY 4.0
It would be wrong to think this is useless, even though it is old.
Thousands of works of art were created in 1929 and are now in the public domain. They can be copied, shared, and adapted, even for commercial purposes, without permission. CC0 1.0 Universal
To name but a few novels that are classics of world literature:
- Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own;
- Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms;
- John Steinbeck - Cup of Gold;
Some movies:
- The Cocoanuts, directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley (the first Marx Brothers feature film);
- Blackmail, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock’s first sound film);
- The Black Watch, directed by John Ford (Ford’s first sound film);
Watch The Skeleton Dance cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks (the first Silly Symphony short from Disney)
Two comic book characters:
Popeye
By E. C. Segar - Newspapers.com, Public Domain, Link
Tintin
By Hergé - Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, PD-US, Link
Sound recordings are subject to different rules. Copyright expires after 100 years, and each song performance has its copyright.
Listen to Singin' in the Rain from The Hollywood Revue of 1929, directed by Charles Reisner.
Source for this post:
January 1, 2025, is Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924!
If you are more interested in all publicly owned works, follow the link above, where all the new PD works are listed.
Alternatively, you can browse and research the most significant public domain work archive: Archive.org.
I'm sure we can expect many future adaptations and remixes of these works, especially now that AI can help with this.
Support and vote for those exceptional witnesses:
@good-karma, @liotes, @fbslo and @detlev.witness.
I appreciate any help you can provide.
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