CREATIVE WORKS FROM 1930 ARE OPEN TO ALL; AS ARE SOUND RECORDINGS FROM 1925.
GUEST BLOG / BY JENNIFER JENKINS & JAMES BOYLE--Jennifer Jenkins is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain and Clinical Professor of Law at Duke Law School. James Boyle is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and Faculty Co-Director of the Center.
On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. The literary highlights range from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage and the first four Nancy Drew novels.
From cartoons and comic strips, the characters Betty Boop, Pluto (originally named Rover), and Blondie and Dagwood made their first appearances.
Films from the year featured Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, the Marx Brothers, and John Wayne in his first leading role. Among the public domain compositions are I Got Rhythm, Georgia on My Mind, and Dream a Little Dream of Me. We are also celebrating paintings from Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. Below you can find lists of some of the most notable books, characters, comics, and cartoons, films, songs, sound recordings, and art entering the public domain.
BOOKS.
This is just a small selection from the thousands of books and plays entering the public domain in 2026. The famous works include modernist masterpieces, detective stories, a science-fiction classic, an early self-help book, and a seminal work on psychoanalysis.
All of them and thousands more will be copyright-free in the US. The newly public domain corpus also includes a wealth of children’s and young adult fiction—the first four Nancy Drew books, the introduction of the characters Dick and Jane, a Newbery Award winner about the life of The Buddha, and the popular illustrated version of The Little Engine That Could.
Works from 1930 are not only enriching the public domain; they also illustrate its value.
“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.” –W. Somerset Maugham
That is a quote from W. Somerset Maugham, whose novel Cakes and Ale is entering the public domain in 2026. But artists don’t merely create “beauty…out of the chaos,” though our current moment has lots of the latter. They create beauty by drawing on our shared culture. Look at Maugham’s title: “Cakes and Ale.” Maugham himself was referring to a classic public domain work, in this case Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” says Sir Toby Belch reprovingly to his pompous Puritan steward Malvolio, who is always eager to judge the behavior of others. Maugham reuses the line precisely to make the same point about puritanical moralizing and, in the case of his novel, artistic hypocrisy.
The narrator is disgusted by the snobbery and judgmental attitudes of his contemporaries towards Rosie Driffield, a former barmaid who became the wife of a famous fictional novelist. Rosie came from a working-class background and was forthright, without pretension, and sexually free. She is now decried for those qualities, but the narrator finds her far more impressive than the bourgeois scolds who disdain her. The title reaches back 330 years to show that one of our greatest playwrights was mocking faux puritanism in exactly the same way.
Maugham's point is that the human race relives those moments and emotions in every era; the desire to moralize is always with us. Now his work is in the public domain and we, too, can reuse his insights and artistry to create new art. The same point holds true for many of the other works entering the public domain this year. The title of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying came from Homer’s Odyssey.
The public domain contains far more than works with expired copyrights—names, titles, and very short phrases are not copyrightable standing alone and are therefore public domain in the US; one does not have to wait for the expiration of the copyright term. But when works enter the public domain, the artistic freedom granted over them is far greater. Plot, characters, images, vignettes; all can now be mined for future inspiration. And that, too, was true in the past just as it is now. The tale of the tenacious little engine that pulls the train over the mountain had been circulating in various forms before the Watty Piper version, or the predecessor it credits.
To tell new stories, we draw from older ones. One work of art inspires another – that is how the public domain feeds creativity. Why care about the public domain? That is one reason why.
FILM.
War films, musicals, thrillers, Westerns, comedies, surrealist satires—this year’s newly public domain films run the gamut. They feature familiar actors: Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, John Wayne, the Marx Brothers, and the film debut of Moe Howard and Larry Fine, who would later be long-running members of The Three Stooges. There are also familiar names among the directors and writers: Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hughes, and even Rube Goldberg and Salvador Dalí.
These films predated the enactment of the 1934-1968 “Hays Code” that censored profanity, criminal activity, “indecent” dance costumes, and sexual content such as “excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures.” In Morocco, Marlene Dietrich, handsomely dressed in a top hat and tails, famously kisses another woman. King of Jazz features the sequence “I Like to Do Things For You,” on Wikipedia as “humorously sadomasochistic.”
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| Betty Boop as a cloud of smoke from a marijuana cigarette (ala Icart), by Leslie Cabarga, 1980. |
Pre-Code Betty Boop was overtly seductive. As critic Gabrielle Bellot wrote: “On the one hand, Betty Boop was a creation of the heterosexual male gaze, with an endless parade of lecherous male characters trying to see under her skirt, yet on the other hand she wore power like a light shawl, her image an in-your-face depiction of unashamed sexuality.” Post-Code Betty Boop covered her shoulders and garter. As with Maugham’s Rosie from Cakes and Ale, frank female sexuality was not to be tolerated. Malvolio would have liked the Hays Code.
Some of the scenes from these films are eerily resonant today. In King of Jazz, a man gets drunk and stammers: “You know what’s the matter with this country? It’s a tariff! That’s who!”, referring to the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that deepened the Great Depression. Today, there is a lot of debate about whether the public knows enough about the importance of the rule of law and the protections of due process. At the end of Animal Crackers, Groucho and Chico Marx (as Captain Spaulding and Ravelli) have this exchange.
Groucho: “We go to court and get a writ of habeas corpus.”
Chico: “You gonna get rid of what?”
Groucho: “Haven’t you ever heard of habeas corpus?”
Chico: “No, but I’ve heard of ‘Habie’s Irish Rose’.”
Groucho sighs in exasperation and walks away
As Faulkner, the author whose novel begins this year’s list of books, wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Cimarron is featured even though it was released in 1931 because it was copyrighted in 1930 and the earlier date controls (date discrepancies are resolved “in favor of the public”).
Please note that only the original films from 1930 are public domain; later versions might have newly added material that is still copyrighted. If a film has been restored or reconstructed, only original and creative additions are eligible for copyright; if a restoration faithfully mimics the preexisting film, it does not contain newly copyrightable material. Putting skill, labor, and money into a project is not enough to qualify it for copyright, and the Supreme Court has made clear that “the sine qua non of copyright is originality.”
WHY CELEBRATE THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
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 such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable both access to and preservation of cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. 1930 was a long time ago and the vast majority of works from that year are not commercially available. You couldn’t buy them, or even find them, if you wanted. When they enter the public domain in 2026, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.
The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. You could think of it as the yin to copyright’s yang. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But the United States Constitution requires that those rights last only for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! It is part of copyright’s ecosystem. The point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so.
The Supreme Court explained: “The copyright term is limited so that the public will not be permanently deprived of the fruits of an artist’s labors.” To quote Justice Joseph Story, this benefits the public by “admitting the people at large, after a short interval, to the full possession and enjoyment of all writings . . . without restraint.”
How does the public domain feed creativity? Here are just a few current illustrations. In 2025 you may have enjoyed Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, derived from Mary Shelley’s novel, or Wicked: For Good, derived from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Perhaps you are looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming epic IMAX version of The Odyssey, Wuthering Heights starring Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw, or Lear Rex, a new version of King Lear starring Al Pacino as Lear. The Great Gatsby entered the public domain in 2021 and has already spawned a number of creative reworkings. 2025 saw others join them. We had The Gatsby Gambit, The Great Mann, Local Heavens, and Mrs. Wilson's Affair: A Great Gatsby Retelling.
Clearly, this is a public domain work on which today's novelists have been feasting. Shakespeare, Dickens, and Austen continue to spawn adaptations too, including a reimagining of Hamlet in present-day London, A Far Better Thing (A Tale of Two Cities with fairy changelings), and The Season of Dragons (Pride and Prejudice and dragons). We haven't yet read it, but very much hope it contains the line, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single dragon in possession of a good hoard of treasure, must be in want of a wife."
The works we are celebrating from 1930 also illustrate how the public domain nurtures creativity. Once again, a fine exemplar is Disney, whose beloved works, from Snow White and Cinderella to The Jungle Book and Sleeping Beauty, have consistently built upon the public domain.
That was as true in 1930 as it is today. The Mickey Mouse cartoons from 1930 made ingenious reuse of public domain music. Here are some of the public domain songs from these works: Morning, Night and Noon in Vienna by Franz von Suppé (1844), the William Tell Overture by Gioachino Rossini (1829), Orphée aux Enfers by Jacques Offenbach (1858), A Hunting We Will Go by Thomas Arne (1777), Oh Susanna and Old Folks at Home/Swanee River by Stephen Foster (1848, 1851), The Farmer in the Dell (1820s) and Pop Goes the Weasel (1850s) (traditionals), and a tune known as the Snake Charmer Song (1840s).
All of these compositions date from before 1880, when the maximum copyright term was 42 years, and could be freely used in 1930 animations.
Sometimes people worry that entry into the public domain could mean the desecration of a beloved character or plot. Yes, inevitably there will be those who capitalize on public domain status to make deliberately shocking content—the slasher movie based on Winnie the Pooh comes to mind, or the low-budget horror films featuring Mickey Mouse. Works like that may even generate outrage—that is their whole marketing plan! But will they be remembered? We have always been able to make slasher or porn versions of Shakespeare, yet I am guessing that the Shakespearean adaptations you remember are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (from Hamlet, RIP Tom Stoppard), West Side Story (from Romeo and Juliet), Forbidden Planet (from The Tempest), or 10 Things I Hate About You (from The Taming of the Shrew).
From the serious to the whimsical, these are public domain reuses with more enduring appeal. Far from dimming the luster of the original works, they have allowed their legacy to live on. The best reason not to care about the merely shocking use of public domain works, without an underlying artistic point, is that they tend not to stand the test of time.
This point is true far beyond Shakespeare. Think of all the other films, cartoons, books, plays, musicals, video games, songs, and other works based on Greek mythology, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or on the works of Austen and Dickens. The Odyssey inspired not only the upcoming Christopher Nolan epic and the title of As I Lay Dying, but also centuries of other remakes—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ulysses, and the Coen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou, to name just a few.
Note that the public domain extends beyond works whose copyrights have expired. Some material is born in the public domain. Ideas, facts, and raw data can never be copyrighted. The public domain also includes official works of the US government such as legislation, legal opinions, and even NASA images. The images from the James Webb telescope, the NASA collections NASA on The Commons (flickr) and NASA image and video library, the famous “Earthrise” photograph taken by astronaut William Anders, and the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (a pictorial record of American life from 1935-1944 that includes Dorothea Lange's powerful photograph "Migrant Mother," one of the enduring images of the Great Depression) are all copyright-free. Another category of public domain material consists of works that creators choose to dedicate to the public domain, and many have done so using Creative Commons’ CC0 tool.
