Public Domain Day 2025

Films

Characters

Musical Compositions

Sound Recordings from 1924

Under a law called the Music Modernization Act, recordings from 1924 will be open for legal reuse, after the conclusion of a 100-year term. There are some incredible performances: George Gershwin performing Rhapsody in Blue, Jelly Roll Morton playing Shreveport Stomp, and an early recording from contralto and civil rights icon Marian Anderson, who is famous for her 1939 performance to an integrated audience of over 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson’s 1924 recording is of the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

As you look through the list above, note that only the 1924 recordings made by these artists are entering the public domain, not their later recordings. Note also that songs first published as part of a movie are treated differently from separate sound recordings because copyright law’s definition of “sound recording” specifically excludes “sounds accompanying a motion picture.” So the 1929 recording of Singin’ in the Rain from the film The Hollywood Revue of 1929 has the same copyright term as the movie and is public domain in 2025, while regular sound recordings from 1929 have the 100-year term and their copyrights won’t expire until 2030. To listen to old recordings, go to the Library of Congress National Jukebox—in 2025 the Library of Congress will make all of the 1924 recordings in its collection available for download, while recordings from 1925 forward will be streaming-only until they are in the public domain.

Art

Copyright will also expire in 2025 over works of art that were published or registered in 1929, including drawings, paintings, and photography. 1929 was when Salvador Dalí moved to Paris and became a key part of the Surrealist art movement, and his Illumined Pleasures, The Accommodations of Desire, and The Great Masturbator will be public domain. While we were able to locate information indicating that those works were published in La Révolution surréaliste or as part of the Dalí exhibition at Goemans, we have not yet found definitive historical information for other artworks, notably René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images.

Magritte’s painting is actually a useful illustration of the intense difficulties in determining the copyright status of many works from long ago. It is only public domain in 2025 if it was “published,” as defined by copyright law, in 1929. If its first publication was not until later, for example at the Palais des Beaux-Arts exhibition in 1933, then the copyright lasts for 95 years after that year. (For never-published, never-registered works, the term is life + 70 years.) Publication status can be more challenging to determine for art than it is for books, songs, or films, which were published when they were officially put on sale or released. Generally the law looks at whether the art was genuinely released to the public. If it was created but remained only in the artist’s studio, this did not count. But the rules are murky and “published” is a term of art in copyright law that was not well-defined. Early court cases suggest that artworks were considered published if they were exhibited without restrictions (sometimes there were measures preventing people from copying works on display), circulated in a magazine, catalogue, or other media with authorization, or offered for sale to the public.

Did any of these things occur in 1929 with The Treachery of Images? We are trying to find out. With the help of art historians and librarians, we have combed through catalogues and magazines from the era and biographies of Magritte. We discovered that another version of the image with the pipe reversed appeared in Variétés magazine—that image is public domain in 2025. But out of an abundance of caution we are still looking into the historical records for information about the famous painting before heralding its official entry into the public domain.

Keep reading to learn more about the public domain! You can use the links below to jump to the answers.

Why celebrate the public domain?
How do copyright and trademark law apply to characters?
What is the impact of the long copyright term?
What are the basic rules for determining whether something is public domain?

Why Celebrate the Public Domain?

When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable both access to and preservation of cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. 1929 was a long time ago and the vast majority of works from that year are not commercially available. You couldn’t buy them, or even find them, if you wanted. When they enter the public domain in 2025, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.

The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. You could think of it as the yin to copyright’s yang. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But the United States Constitution requires that those rights last only for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! It is part of copyright’s ecosystem. The point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so.

How does the public domain feed creativity? Here are just two examples from 2024. You may have enjoyed the film Wicked in 2024. Like many of its predecessors, it is based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books, and it offers origin stories for the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good. From the literary realm, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huckleberry’s friend who is an escaped slave. The novel won the 2024 National Book Award and Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. As summed up by a New York Times review: “‘Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.” Mark Twain famously wanted copyright to last forever—if he had his wish, would his heirs have sued Everett? Thankfully, we did not have to find out, and Everett could publish James without such litigation.

James continues a tradition of retelling iconic works from new character perspectives. When author Alice Randall sought to revisit Gone With the Wind from the slaves’ perspective in The Wind Done Gone (2001), she was sued for copyright infringement. Gone With the Wind is copyrighted until 2032, and Randall only won the right to publish her work after a stressful and expensive lawsuit. (Full disclosure: I know it was stressful because I was one of her lawyers. Remarkably, the book was initially banned by a district court decision before the ban was lifted by the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.)

The works we are celebrating from 1929 also illustrate how the public domain nurtures creativity. Once again, one of the best exemplars is Disney itself, whose beloved works have consistently built upon the public domain. The Mickey cartoons from 1929 are no exception. One of the things that made them so popular was their ingenious reuse of music. At the time, synchronizing moving images with sound was still new, and Walt Disney (correctly) predicted that sound films were the future. Steamboat Willie pioneered a technique that would even become known as “mickey mousing”—synchronizing music with what was occurring on screen. Here is only a partial list of public domain music that could be freely used in the 1929 cartoons. All of these compositions date from before 1880, when the maximum copyright term was 42 years: Blue Danube, Pop Goes the Weasel, Yankee Doodle, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, Ach Du Lieber Augustin, Listen to the Mocking Bird, A-Hunting We Will Go, Dixie, The Girl I Left Behind Me, a tune known as the snake charmer song, Coming Thru the Rye, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Auld Lang Syne, Aloha ‘Oe, Turkey in the Straw, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, Habanera and Toreador Song from Carmen, Lizst’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Goodnight, Ladies.

This is the promise of the public domain. Who knows what this year’s newly public domain works might inspire? Yes, inevitably there will be slasher films, trying to trade on the shock of putting a familiar character in an unfamiliar genre. They may even generate a lot of buzz—their creators certainly hope so. But the ability freely to revisit public domain works spurs a much wider range of creativity, likely to have more lasting impact. Think of all the films, cartoons, books, plays, musicals, video games, songs, and other works based on Greek mythology, the works of Shakespeare, Jane Austen’s novels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. What remakes stand the test of time? With Shakespeare, some of the works that come to mind range from The Lion King to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (from Hamlet), and from West Side Story (from Romeo and Juliet) to 10 Things I Hate About You and Kiss Me Kate (from The Taming of the Shrew). From the serious to the whimsical, these are public domain reuses with more enduring appeal. Far from dimming the luster of the original works, they have allowed their legacy to live on.

Note that the public domain extends beyond works whose copyrights have expired. Some material is born in the public domain. Ideas, facts, and raw data can never be copyrighted. The public domain also includes official works of the US government such as legislation, legal opinions, and even NASA images. The images from the James Webb telescope, the NASA collections NASA on The Commons (flickr) and NASA image and video library, the famous “Earthrise” photograph taken by astronaut William Anders, and the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (a pictorial record of American life from 1935-1944) are all copyright-free. Another category of public domain material consists of works that creators choose to dedicate to the public domain, and many have done so using Creative Commons’ CC0 tool.

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How do copyright and trademark law apply to characters?

When Mickey Mouse 1.0 went into the public domain last year, he joined a host of other public domain characters—Winnie-the-Pooh, Sherlock Holmes, Snow White, Cinderella, Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, Robin Hood, Santa Claus, and the Wonderful Wizard of Oz characters, to name a few. This year, we get new iterations of Mickey and Minnie, and the first versions of Popeye and Tintin (plus the dog Snowy). Looking ahead, an exciting new cast of characters will become public domain in the coming years: Betty Boop and Pluto (originally named Rover) in 2026, Goofy in 2028 (originally named Dippy Dawg), Mary Poppins and Donald Duck in 2030, Superman in 2034, Batman in 2035, Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny in 2036, and Wonder Woman in 2037.

When the copyright expires over a creative work, the characters within that work enter the public domain, and you can use them in new works without permission or fee. What if those characters also appear in more recent works that remain copyrighted? You can still use the public domain version of the character, as well as uncopyrightable elements from later iterations. But you cannot use new, still-copyrighted versions of the character until those rights expire (unless your use qualifies as "fair use"). Here are the basic rules.

First, under US copyright law, anyone is free to use characters as they appeared in public domain works. If those characters recur in later works that are still under copyright, the rights only extend to the newly added material in those works, not the underlying material from the public domain works—that content remains freely available.

Second, with newer versions of characters, copyright only extends to their features that qualify for protection. It is not enough for the new material to be different. The features must be “original, creative expression,” meaning that they were independently created (as opposed to copied from somewhere else) and possess at least a modicum of creativity. Mere “ideas” such as generic character traits are not copyrightable. Nor are “merely trivial” or “miniscule” variations added to the original characters. In addition, using commonplace elements that have become standard or indispensable (copyright law calls these “scènes à faire”) is not infringement.[7]

Not all characters will be copyrightable independently of the stories in which they appear. In a famous case from 1930, a judge explained why two lovers from a play were uncopyrightable: “The lovers are so faintly indicated as to be no more than stage properties. They are loving and fertile; that is really all that can be said of them, and anyone else is quite within his rights if he puts loving and fertile lovers in a play of his own, wherever he gets the cue.” Another famous case actually involved a work that is featured in this year’s celebration, The Maltese Falcon. You might reasonably assume that the hard-boiled, tough-guy detective Sam Spade just become copyright-free in 2025. Intriguingly, no. In 1954, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that he was never copyrightable to begin with. It explained that a character was only copyrightable if it “really constitutes the story being told, but if the character is only the chessman in the game of telling the story he is not within the area of the protection afforded by the copyright.” If characters were merely “vehicles for the story told,” they were not themselves copyrightable.[8]

Later cases have retreated from this stringent standard, however. Mickey Mouse, the characters from Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky movies, and even the Batmobile (even though it was a car that “lacks sentient attributes and does not speak”) were all held to be copyrightable characters. On the other hand, “The Moodsters” – five color-coded characters that represented human emotions – were deemed uncopyrightable. The creator of The Moodsters had claimed that Disney infringed her copyright in these characters with its first Inside Out movie. Among other things, the court explained that “using a color to represent a mood or emotion” was an uncopyrightable idea, and found that The Moodsters lacked “consistent, identifiable character traits and attributes.”

What if the character is no longer copyrighted, but its name or image is still subject to trademark rights? Copyrights and trademarks are different. Copyrights cover creative works and prevent people from copying and adapting them without permission, with the goal of providing economic incentives to create and distribute cultural material. Trademarks cover words, logos, images, and other signifiers that serve as brands identifying the source of a product. Nike can prevent other producers of athletic apparel from putting “Nike” or a swoosh on their merchandise so that when purchasers see those indicators, they know they are getting a Nike product.

Trademark law is all about preventing consumer confusion, and not about getting in the way of creativity. You can use a character's name or image in a new creative work so long as consumers are not likely to be misled into thinking that your work is produced or sponsored by the trademark holder. One way to help ensure that consumers are not confused is to make the actual source of the work – you or your company – clear on the title screen or cover, along with a prominent disclaimer indicating that your work was not produced, endorsed, licensed, or approved by the trademark owner.

Hearst Holdings owns the trademark rights to “Popeye” for products such as cartoon strips, "costumed figures" for musical plays and theatrical shows, amusement parks, advertising services, and clothing. These trademark rights are limited, and do not extend to unrelated products. “Popeyes” chicken and biscuits can coexist with Hearst's “Popeye” the sailor products, just as Dove soap and Dove chocolate, or Delta faucets and Delta airlines, can use the same brand name even though they are different companies.

Now that Popeye 1.0 is in the public domain, can you use “Popeye” in a new work featuring the public domain character? The answer should be yes, so long as people do not think Hearst is producing or sponsoring your work. In fact, trademark law has a number of speech-protecting limitations that safeguard such artistic uses. One defense allows “nominative use” of a trademark as a point of reference – for example, using “Popeye” accurately to refer to the character in your work. Another comes from a case called Rogers v. Grimaldi, which privileged the use of trademarks in titles of expressive works when the term has some artistic relevance to the new work and does not explicitly mislead as to the source of the work. While a disclaimer is not required to benefit from these limitations, it can nevertheless be useful to make abundantly clear that you are not providing an official Hearst production.

Hearst has recently sought to extend its rights beyond the “Popeye” name, and filed two applications for federal trademark registrations of graphical depictions of Popeye. One application seeks to trademark the image to the right for various “entertainment services” including films and television series, and the other deals with NFTs. The trademark office has not granted the applications because, at least as of November 2024, Hearst has not begun using the Popeye images as brand identifiers for the relevant products. Until it does so, it cannot own trademark rights in those images.

Even if Hearst does begin using the images in commerce and successfully obtains trademark rights, you can still legally put the 1929 Popeye character in a new creative work in a way that does not mislead purchasers into thinking they are getting a Hearst-branded product. In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court said that trademarks cannot be used to make an end run around copyright law because this would “create a species of mutant copyright law that limits the public’s federal right to copy and to use expired copyrights.” In other words, trademark rights cannot be used to block the freedoms that the expiration of copyright allows, such as using a public domain character in a book or movie. As with the “Popeye” name, one way to help dispel potential confusion is to make it clear that you are responsible for the new work, and to add a disclaimer indicating that your work is not produced or sponsored by Hearst.

You can read a fuller analysis here about how all of these rules applied to Mickey Mouse when he entered the public domain.

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What is the impact of the long copyright term?

For copyrighted culture, the public domain arrives only after a long wait. Works from 1929 were first set to go into the public domain after a 56-year term in 1985, but a term extension pushed that date to 2005. They were then supposed to go into the public domain in 2005, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit another 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years. Now the wait is over.

Many of the works featured above are famous; that is why we included them. Their copyright holders benefitted from 20 more years of copyright because the works were still earning royalties. But they are just the tip of the iceberg. When Congress extended the copyright term for these works, it also did so for all of the works whose commercial viability had long lapsed. For the vast majority—probably 99%—of works from 1929, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason. A Congressional Research Service report indicated that only around 2% of copyrights between 55 and 75 years old retain commercial value. After 75 years, that percentage is even lower. Most older works are “orphan works,” where the copyright owner cannot be found at all.

This is why a former head of our Copyright Office concluded that adding an extra 20 years to the US copyright term was a “big mistake.” Indeed, there is a consensus among policymakers, economists, and academics that lengthy copyright extensions impose costs that far outweigh their benefits. Why? The benefits are minuscule—economists (including five Nobel laureates) have shown that term extension does not spur additional creativity. At the same time, it causes enormous harm, locking away millions of older works that are no longer generating any revenue for the copyright holders. Films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them. The works of historians and journalists are incomplete. Artists find their cultural heritage off limits.

The public domain enables the rediscovery and reuse of works that might otherwise be forgotten. Empirical studies have shown that public domain books are less expensive, available in more editions and formats, and more likely to be in print—see here, here, and here. The works highlighted above are just a tiny snapshot of what will be copyright-free. Many more are waiting to be found and appreciated.

While the arrival of works into the public domain is cause for celebration, the length of the copyright term means that even though works from 1929 are legally available, this does always not mean they are actually available. Many films from the era have been lost forever. Even the successful films we have highlighted here are incomplete—footage is missing from The Broadway Melody, Gold Diggers of Broadway, Show Boat, and Say It With Songs.

The fact that works from 1929 are legally available also does not mean that rights holders won't continue to claim copyright over them. In 2023 we covered the Sherlock Holmes saga. The ingenious detective and his faithful sidekick Dr. Watson had been in the public domain for a long time. But that did not stop Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. from demanding licensing fees. Most people simply paid up. But when Leslie Klinger, a lawyer and Sherlock Holmes scholar, fought back, a court decisively confirmed that all of the elements in the out-of-copyright Sherlock Holmes stories are “free for public use.”

The estate appealed, in a move that the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals described as bordering on the “frivolous” and “quixotic.” The appeals court affirmed Klinger’s right to use the Holmes and Watson characters and awarded him attorney’s fees. Judge Richard Posner called out the estate’s “unlawful business strategy”:

The Doyle estate’s business strategy is plain: charge a modest license fee for which there is no legal basis, in the hope that the "rational" writer or publisher asked for the fee will pay it rather than incur a greater cost, in legal expenses, in challenging the legality of the demand…only Klinger (so far as we know) resisted. In effect he was a private attorney general, combating a disreputable business practice — a form of extortion…It’s time the estate, in its own self-interest, changed its business model. Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate (7th Cir. 2014)

Such court decisions have not deterred other rights holders from claiming copyright over public domain properties. To take one example, the owners of the rights to Charlie Chaplin’s films have been sending aggressive letters to small community theaters telling them that they cannot screen Chaplin films that are legally in the public domain. The letters contain assertions about US copyright law that are, to use the technical term, bogus. To be sure, Chaplin was a genius and his successors have legitimate rights over his still-copyrighted films. But they do not have the right to squelch activities that are entirely legal.

The Chaplin Office nevertheless claims that the 1925 film The Gold Rush cannot be screened because the copyright in the underlying screenplay does not expire until 70 years after Chaplin’s death, or the end of 2047, because Chaplin was British and his copyright was restored under special rules for works by foreign authors. (They focus on the screenplay because the film entered the public domain in 1953 due to non-renewal of its copyright.) Even if this restoration met copyright’s requirements (it does not appear to) there is a more basic mistake in their calculation: they cite to the wrong provision of US copyright law, §303, for the life + 70 term, ignoring that it is only for works that were “created but not published or copyrighted before January 1, 1978.” The Copyright Office records show that the screenplay was copyrighted in 1925, and for such works the law states that the copyright lasts for “the remainder of the term of copyright that the work would have otherwise been granted in the United States,” which is 95 years under §304 of the Copyright Act, making the work public domain in 2021. Case closed.

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What are the basic rules for determining whether something is public domain?

How long does copyright last in the United States? The 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act gave works published or registered before 1978 a 95-year term, expiring on January 1 after the conclusion of the 95th year. Doing the math, you add 96 years to the publication date. Works from 1929 were copyrighted for 95 years—through 2024—and are in the public domain January 1, 2025. This year's featured works are in the public domain because of either a 1929 registration or publication with a 1929 copyright notice. We were also able to track down the renewal data indicating that they are still in-copyright through the end of 2024 and entering the public domain in 2025.

Works published before 1978 had to meet certain requirements to be eligible for the full 95-year term—they had to be published with a copyright notice, and works from before 1964 also had to have their copyrights renewed after an initial 28-year term. Works published from 1978 through 3/1/1989 without a notice had to register their copyrights within five years to fix the lack of copyright notice. This means that many works published after 1929 might technically be in the public domain. However, as a practical matter, users sometimes have to assume they’re still copyrighted (or risk a lawsuit) because the relevant copyright information is difficult to find. We do not have clear and comprehensive records of copyright ownership and older records can be fragmentary, confused, or lost. In addition, as mentioned earlier, the concept of "publication" is important and has a special meaning under copyright law. It refers to when the work was sold or distributed to the general public with the authority of the copyright owner. Determining whether and when publication occurred can be complicated and vary depending on the kind of work—with music from before 1978, for example, only distribution in written form counted as a publication.

For pre-1978 works that were never published or registered, the term is different: life-plus-70 years for works by natural persons, and 120 years from creation for works of corporate authorship. In this category, works created by people who died in 1954 are in the public domain in 2025. Newer works created since 1978 are also treated differently from those published before 1978. Works by natural persons from 1978 forward have a life-plus-70 term, while works of corporate authorship are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. This is the copyright term for works created today, and there are no longer notice or renewal requirements.

What about foreign works? Some countries have a life-plus-50 term and many others, including EU countries, have a life-plus-70-year term, even for the older works that have the 95-year term in the US. This means that works might be copyrighted in one country and copyright-free in another. For example, Tintin enters the US public domain in 2025 but is still copyrighted in the EU until 2054, because the author died in 1983. In life-plus-70 jurisdictions, works from authors who died in 1954 are public domain this year, so they are celebrating a different set of works on Public Domain Day. How do you know which law applies to you? As a general matter, courts have said that users are governed by the law in the jurisdiction where they are using the creative work. But this inquiry can be more complicated and depend on the circumstances surrounding the use.

In the US, many foreign works from 1929 are copyrighted until 2025 because of a provision that, in 1996, restored copyright over certain foreign works that had fallen into the US public domain because of non-compliance with notice or renewal requirements. This restored term applies to many of the foreign works we are highlighting. You can learn more about how this functions from the Copyright Office's circular Copyright Restoration Under the URAA. If the owners of copyright in foreign works filed a Notice of Intent to Enforce their restored copyright you can find that information here. You can also find copyright restoration records in the Copyright Office records or the Copyright Office’s search portal here.

What is the copyright term for sound recordings? The Music Modernization Act’s “Classics Protection and Access Act” established a timeline for old recordings to enter the public domain. Recordings first published between 1923–1946 are public domain in January 2024–2047 (the year after a 100-year term). Then there is a ten-year pause from 2048–2058. After that, recordings first published between 1947–1956 are public domain in January 2058–2067, after a 110-year term. The term for all remaining recordings first fixed from 1957 until February 15, 1972 ends on February 15, 2067. Note that the term of protection for sound recordings in other countries is different from the one in the US: in the EU it is 70 years, and elsewhere it is 50 years.

Want to learn more about the public domain? Here is the legal background on how we got our current copyright terms (including summaries of court cases), why the public domain matters, and answers to Frequently Asked Questions. You can also read James Boyle’s book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press, 2008)—naturally, you can read the full text of The Public Domain online at no cost and you are free to copy and redistribute it for non-commercial purposes.

More information on the copyright term can be found on this excellent chart on Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States. For additional guidance from the Copyright Office, see its circulars on Duration of Copyright, How to Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work, and Copyright Restoration Under the URAA. For a detailed guide to identifying public domain material, you can purchase Stephen Fishman’s The Public Domain: How to Find & Use Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art & More. You can also read “In Ambiguous Battle: The Promise (and Pathos) of Public Domain Day,” an article by Center Director Jennifer Jenkins revealing the promise and the limits of various attempts to reverse the erosion of the public domain, referring to a previous Public Domain Day.

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[1] Our featured works are only entering the public domain under US copyright law. The copyright term for older works is different in other countries. In the EU, works from authors who died in 1954 are going into the public domain in 2025 after a life-plus-70 year term. As a general matter, under the principle of lex loci delicti, users are governed by the law in the jurisdiction where they are using the creative work. See Itar-Tass Russian News Agency v. Russian Kurier, Inc., 153 F.3d 82 (2d Cir. 1998). But this inquiry can be more complicated and fact-specific.

[2] Even though a work is still in-copyright, you may legally use it in certain ways if your activity qualifies for copyright’s “fair use” exception.

[3] In the US, only the author’s works from 1929 and earlier are in the public domain, not all of the other work published by that author. With regard to newly copyright-free works, only the original versions published in 1929 are entering the US public domain. Later versions of them—adaptations, movies, or translations—may still be copyrighted. However the later copyright only covers newly added creative material. The original content from the 1929 work remains free. If a film has been restored or reconstructed, only original and creative additions are eligible for copyright; if a restoration faithfully mimics the preexisting film, it does not contain newly copyrightable material. Putting skill, labor, and money into a project is not enough to qualify it for copyright. The Supreme Court has made clear that “the sine qua non of copyright is originality.”
As you look through these works from 1929, please note that they offer a temporal cross section of our cultural past, capturing the era in its complexity. Unfortunately many of the works from 1929 contain racist and sexist stereotypes and demeaning language. When such works enter the public domain, anyone is free to critique and remake them, even if doing so goes beyond what would be allowed under copyright’s fair use doctrine.

[4] The Maltese Falcon initially appeared as a series of five installments in Black Mask magazine. Even though the final installment was published in January 1930, it was copyrighted in December 1929, making the full story public domain in 2025. The book version of The Maltese Falcon was then published in 1930—while it made textual edits to the serialized version, the plot and events are the same as the public domain story.

[5] Both An American in Paris and Bolero were written and performed in 1928, but the copyright records show a date of 1929. Under copyright law at the time, musical compositions were not copyrighted until a manuscript was published with a copyright notice, and we did not find sheet music with a 1928 copyright notice. Therefore, in an abundance of caution, we did not highlight them until 2025.

[6] Note that US copyright law allows you to cover a song without permission while it is still copyrighted under the “compulsory license” in §115, so long as you do not “change the basic melody or fundamental character” of the original song and pay a pre-set royalty rate. When a song is in the public domain you can make covers without complying with this provision, and you can also make other adaptations, performances, and interpolations.

[7] See the Copyright Office Compendium. Courts have held that being “nice,” having a “cocky attitude,” and being “young, attractive, and sarcastic” are not independently copyrightable character traits. See Shame on You Prods. v. Banks (C.D. Cal. 2015, aff’d 9th Cir. 2017); Campbell v. Walt Disney Co. (N.D. Cal. 2010); Gable v. Nat’l Broad. Co. (C.D. Cal. 2010).

[8] This decision was driven in part by the unusual circumstances of the case. Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, had sold his rights to Warner Brothers, who was then trying to stop Hammett from using the characters he originally created in new stories.