Public Domain Day 2025

With the turning of the calendar over to another year, a new subset of canonical (and more obscure!) titles have become available via the Public Domain. Some of the more well known titles entering the public domain this year are Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. These three titles were all published in 1929, meaning their 95 year copyright term expired at the drop of midnight on January 1st, 2025.

Additionally, joining some original Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh character sketches that have in the past couple of years entered the public domain – everyone’s favorite spinach-can popping, bicep-flexing sailor, Popeye, will join the public domain as well. And, just as his predecessors before him, it appears he is slated to appear in a number of horror films which have done well to turn classical children’s characters into something else entirely.

Playbill from thecinemaarchives.com

Beyond classic children’s characters and classical works of literature, this year the public domain marks a rather large shift in cinema. While the transition had largely already been made, and indeed, some “talkies” hit the public domain last year, having come out in 1928, it wasn’t until one year later, 1929, that these “talkies” took over as the preeminent form of motion pictures. Alfred Hitchcock’s first synchronized sound film, Blackmail, was released in 1929 and has thus entered the public domain this year. Additionally, Hallelujah, which is the first Hollywood film with an entirely black cast, in now in the public domain as well.