It's a new year, which means a new generation of creative works has entered the public domain. Today, many materials copyrighted in 1929, as well as sound recordings from 1924, are fair game for free adaptation, reuse, copying and distribution. Center for the Public Domain at Duke Law School assembled some of the most notable properties that entered the public domain in early 2025.
This is an important year for cinema, with several prominent directors debuting their first sound projects, such as Alfred Hitchcock's film. Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille Dynamite. 1929 was also the year Walt Disney directed the iconic film Skeleton dance the animated short film by Ub Iwerks, and the moment Mickey Mouse starred in his first talkie. The Fearless Tintin and the original Popeye characters also became public knowledge.
The compositions of several wonderful songs have become public knowledge today. There are catchy show tunes such as Singing in the rain And American in Paris along with jazz standards Isn't this bad behavior? And (What did I do to be like this) Black and blue and classic hits such as Masterpiece Bolero. The record contains tracks such as a wonderful song by George Gershwin. Rhapsody in Blues and the look of the legendary singer Marian Anderson on My path is cloudy.
Finally, several authors appeared in the Duke Law review. Noir fans will be delighted to see Dashiell Hammett's film. Maltese falcon And Red harvest Here. Other notable literary works now in the public domain include Your own room Virginia Woolf, Farewell to weapons Ernest Hemingway, The Mystery of the Seven Dials Agatha Christie and Sound and fury William Faulkner. And for poetry lovers – the original German version of the poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters to a young poet is also on the list.