New York (AFP) – From “A Farewell to Arms” to the cartoon character Popeye the Sailor, thousands of artistic works will enter the public domain in the United States on Wednesday. US copyright law expires after 95 years for books, films, and other works of art, while sound recordings from 1924 will also be copyright-free. By entering the public domain, the pieces can be copied, shared, reproduced, or adapted by anyone without paying the rights owner.
This year’s crop includes internationally recognized figures such as the comic character Tintin, who made his debut in a Belgian newspaper in 1929, and Popeye the Sailor, created by cartoonist Elzie Crisler Segar. Every December, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain publishes a list of the cultural works that lose their copyright in the new year. The center, part of the Duke University School of Law in the southeastern US state of North Carolina, makes the list available on its website for anyone to peruse.
“In past years we have celebrated an exciting cast of public domain characters: the original Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh, and the final iterations of Sherlock Holmes from Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories,” center director Jennifer Jenkins wrote on its website. “In 2025 copyright expires over more aspects of Mickey from his 1929 incarnations, along with the initial versions of Popeye and Tintin.”
Among the literary works entering the US public domain on January 1 are the novels “The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner, “A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway, “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf, and the first English translation of “All Quiet on the Western Front” by the German author Erich Maria Remarque. Films that will be in the public domain include “Blackmail,” directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and “The Black Watch,” the first sound film by Oscar-winning director John Ford.
Musical compositions published in 1929, such as “Bolero” by French composer Maurice Ravel and “An American in Paris” by George Gershwin, will lose their copyrights, though only recordings from 1924 or earlier will be in the public domain.
© 2024 AFP
