It’s the start of a new year, which means a fresh 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 Center for Public Domain at Duke Law School collected some of the more notable properties that entered public domain with the start of 2025.
This is a big year when it comes to film, with several seminal directors debuting their first projects with sound, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille’s Dynamite. 1929 was also the year when 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 original Popeye characters have arrived in the public domain as well.
The compositions for several great songs joined the public…
