It's the start of a new year, which means a new 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 Public Domain Center at Duke Law School collected some of the most notable properties to enter the public domain in early 2025.
This is a big year when it comes to film, with several notable directors releasing their first projects with sound, such as Alfred Hitchcock. Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille Dynamite. 1929 was also the year 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 the original Popeye characters have also reached the public domain.
The compositions of several great songs became public domain today. There are memorable show tunes like Singing in the rain and An American in Paris along with jazz standards I'm not behaving badly and (What did I do to be like this?) Black and blue and classic hits like the masterpiece Bolero. As for the recording, there are songs like the beautiful one by George Gershwin. Rhapsody in blue and the version of the legendary singer Marian Anderson My path is cloudy.
Finally, several authors had titles in the Duke Law abstract. Film noir fans will be happy to see Dashiell Hammett The maltese falcon and red harvest here. Other notable literary works now in the public domain include A room of your own by Virginia Woolf, 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 poetry lovers, the original German version by Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters to a young poet is also on the list.
