Happy New Year! One of my favorite new traditions since 2019 has been noting all the creative works that enter the public domain here in the United States every January 1st. For this year, 2025, that means creative works first published in the U.S. in 1929 as well as sound recordings from 1924.
There’s a host of caveats and, of course, U.S. copyright is different from other parts of the world, often markedly so. That’s why Erich Maria Remarque’s autobiographical novel All Quiet on the Western Front is now in the public domain here in America, but still protected under copyright in Germany!
For this reason, I urge you to check out the subject matter expertise of who are becoming my “usual suspects” of all things copyright.
First up is Aaron Moss and his blog Copyright Lately. He gives you a good summary of the major works that are entering the public domain, but you can keep reading and get as wonky as you wish: for example, the 1996 Uruguay Rounds Agreements Act (URAA). I also appreciate his plea that doing slasher films of every new cartoon character entering the public domain is not a requirement. Unfortunately, these pleas will fall on the deaf ears of these homicidal maniacs… even though sound films were really ramping up in 1929.
Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle also provide the Center for the Study of the Public Domain’s annual roundup of notable entrants along with insightful commentary.
As always, I find this to be an intriguing time capsule of an era that’s almost impossibly ancient in Internet terms, but exciting in terms of media transformation. Even though 1927’s The Jazz Singer heralded the arrival of “the talkies,” sound pictures were not universally screened in the nation’s cinemas as of 1929. Still, Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound picture enters the public domain this year (Blackmail) as does the Marx Brothers’ The Cocoanuts and DIsney’s The Skeleton Dance.
As alluded to in the comic above, there’s some personal resonance for this year’s entrants. I’ve never felt strongly about Popeye, but the Tintin and the Asterix books were some of the first books I repeatedly checked out of my public library, along with Bring on the Bad Guys and other tomes by Stan Lee. This, incidentally, required my mother to intervene so my siblings and I had a regular library card vs. a restricted children’s card as Tintin, Asterix, and Doctor Doom are corrupting influences. Okay, now that I read that back, they are, especially in the case of Tintin, who I can only assume will become a slasher this year (he’s already been a socialist revolutionary), but still.
There’s also Buck Rogers, whom I parodied via audio back in 2019, but now could be ripe for a renewed proper space opera treatment. His thematic colleague, Flash Gordon, will have to wait five more years to enter the public domain, but rest assured, he will. Then, they can team up and clean up the super-racketeers and innumerable cartoon slashers unleashed by the public domain to date.
If you want to check out additional works, the Public Domain Review has a good overview of works from across the world and their timeline and HathiTrust has a searchable database of the many thousands of works they know are in the public domain.
I’ll close with a musical work that should be recognizable to many of you… and if it doesn’t make it into one of these slasher films, it’s a missed opportunity!
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