AFP – From A Farewell to Arms to the cartoon character Popeye the Sailor, thousands of artistic works entered the public domain in the United States (US) yesterday.
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 recognised 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 centre, 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,” centre 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 yesterday were 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 are 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, lost their copyrights, though only recordings from 1924 or earlier are in the public domain.
