Thanks to the public domain, Tintin can now dance the bones in Rhapsody in Blue

It’s the start of a new year, which means a new crop of creative works has entered the public domain. Today, many things that were copyrighted in 1929, as well as sound recordings from 1924, become fair game for free adaptation, reuse, copying and sharing. The Center for Public Domain at Duke Law School has collected some of the most notable buildings that entered the public domain as early as 2025.

This is a big year when it comes to film, when several directors are starting to release their projects with sound, like Alfred Hitchcock’s. Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille’s Dynamite. 1929 was also the year that Walt Disney directed the icon Bone Dance a short played by Ub Iwerks, and when Mickey Mouse played on his first talkie. The intrepid Tintin and the original Popeye characters are back in the public domain.

A few beautiful song lyrics have joined the public domain today. There are some memorable show tunes as well Singin’ In The Rain again An American in Paris in keeping with jazz standards Ain’t Misbehavin’ again (Make Me So) Black and Blue and timeless hits like a masterpiece The Boléro. On the recording side there are tracks like the great George Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue and Marian Anderson’s take on the famous singer My Path Is Cloudy.

Finally, several authors had degrees in the Duke Law roundup. Noir fans will be delighted to see Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon again Red Harvest here. Some notable literary works now in the public domain include Single Room by Virginia Woolf, Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway, The mystery of the seven dials by Agatha Christie and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. And for lovers of verse, the first German translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is listed again.