January 1, 2025 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924!



By Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle
Directors, Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain
CC BY 4.0
Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different.

On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. 2025 marks a milestone: all of the books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’ in the Rain. Below is just a handful of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2025. To find more material from 1929, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.

The title of Faulkner’s novel was itself taken from a public domain work, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and its lament over the seeming meaningless of life. “Life…is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” The Sound and the Fury was published on October 7, 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression. Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. During those intervening twenty years the world had witnessed unspeakable horrors: economic crises had fueled the rise of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Then came World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the beginnings of the Cold War. In August of 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic weapon. A book written in the shadow of economic disaster was being celebrated after worldwide catastrophe and in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Despite all of that, Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel acceptance speech sounded a note of defiant optimism, and an uncompromising defense of role of art in helping us understand ourselves and our time:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things…The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

“Not merely the record of man, but one of the pillars that helps him prevail.” Words written by the author of a timeless work that took from the public domain and now gives back to it. In an historical moment when many are inclined to despair, to believe that the problems and divisions of our society are too intractable, too complex for hope, Faulkner speaks to us of “the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” But Faulkner’s work was neither ephemeral nor doomed. To use his words again, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Why care about the public domain? That is why.

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