Thanks to public control, Tintin can now dance to Rhapsody in Blue

It’s the start of a new year, which means new products have entered the public domain. Today, many materials that were copyrighted in 1929, as well as sound recordings from 1924, are fair game for adaptation, reuse, copying and sharing. Center for the Public Domain at Duke Law School collected some of the most popular products that entered the market in the beginning of 2025.

This is a big year for cinema, with several directors presenting their first projects with sound, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s. Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille’s Dynamite. 1929 was also the year Walt Disney directed the picture Skeleton Dance a short film by Ub Iwerks, and where Mickey Mouse starred in his first talkie. The brave Tintin and Popeye characters are back in the crowd.

The records of several great songs have entered the public domain today. There are memorable songs for the show as well Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris along with jazz standards Ain’t Misbehavin’ and (What Did I Do To Be That Way) Black and Blue and classical music as art Bolero. On the recording side there are songs like the beautiful George Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue and the famous singer Marian Anderson is participating My Way’s Cloudy.

Finally, several authors had positions in the Duke Law roundup. Noir fans will be happy to see Dashiell Hammett The Maltese River and Red Harvest Here. Some of the popular public services include: His Room and Virginia Woolf, A Farewell to Arms and Ernest Hemmingway, Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie and The Sound and the Fury and William Faulkner. And for lovers of the verses, the original German version of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is also on the list.