In the U.S., January 1 wasn’t just New Year’s Day. It was also Public Domain Day, when creative works from 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 entered the public domain.
This year’s batch is a good one. Among the works:
Books: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner; A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway; Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.
Comic book characters: The earliest comics featuring Popeye, Buck Rogers, and Tintin.
Movies: The Cocoanuts, the Marx Brothers’ first feature film; Blackmail, Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film; and The Skeleton Dance, an animated short produced by Walt Disney. Also: 12 Mickey Mouse shorts, including The Karnival Kid, the first in which he talks. Steamboat Willie, the first film to feature Mickey Mouse, entered the public domain last year.
Music compositions: Maurice Ravel’s Boléro; “Singin’ in the Rain”; George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”; “Happy Days Are Here Again”; Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?”
Sound recordings: Rhapsody in Blue, performed by George Gershwin; “It Had To Be You,” performed by the Isham Jones Orchestra and Marion Harris; “My Way’s Cloudy,” performed by Marian Anderson; “Shreveport Stomp,” performed by Jelly Roll Morton.
Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a more comprehensive list along with background information about copyright law and the public domain.
