Cartoons like Betty Boop, books like the Nancy Drew series, movies like All Quiet on the Western Front and songs like “Georgia on My Mind” are now all in the public domain.
In United States copyright law, a copyright lasts for 95 years after a work was created, and 100 years for sound recordings. That means on Jan. 1 this year, works from 1930, and sound recordings from 1925, have entered the public domain. That means artists can reinterpret those items in new works, movie screenings can air the original films for free and much more.
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Jennifer Jenkins, Director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain and clinical professor of law at Duke Law School and James Boyle, the William Neal Reynolds professor of law at Duke Law School and faculty co-director of the Center, broke down what all this means, and some of the major works it applies to, in a thorough blog post.
Books that are now in the public domain include William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Agatha Christie’ The Murder at the Vicarage, which was the first novel featuring Miss Marple. Noël Coward’s Private Lives are now public domain, as are the first four Nancy Drew books, written by Mildred Benson under the name Carolyn Keene.
Betty Boop also premiered in 1930, in Fleischer Studios’ cartoon Dizzy Dishes. Disney’s Pluto — first named Rover — also made his debut in 1930, in the cartoons The Chain Gang and The Picnic. Jenkins and Reynolds note, however, that as with Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Winnie-the-Pooh, it’s only those original versions of those characters that are in the public domain now.
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Movies that are now public domain include Oscar Best Picture winners All Quiet on the Western Front and Cimarron, King of Jazz (which was Bing Crosby’s first movie), Free and Easy (which has Buster Keaton’s first movie role) and Anna Christie (Great Garbo’s first talkie). These are some of the last movies released before the 1934-1968 “Hays Code” was enacted, which severely limited what could be shown on screen, like crime, profanity and “lustful” sexuality.
Four iconic songs written by George and Ira Gershwin — “I Got Rhythm,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” “But Not for Me” and “Embraceable You” — are all now in the public domain. They’re joined by songs like “Georgia on My Mind,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and “Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight.” That song is best known by younger generations for the recording by Tiny Tim that featured in Spongebob Squarepants.
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Some of the 1925 sound recordings that are now public domain include civil right activist’s “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong’s “The St. Louis Blues” and Gene Austin’s “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.”
The blog post explains, “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 can make the works fully available. They noted that the “vast majority of works” from 1930 are not commercially available, but now any work from that time can be rescued “from obscurity.”
In addition to enjoying these works anew, they can also inspire completely new works (like Wicked, which used Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, or the many works inspired by Jane Austen novels).
