Smart News | December 30, 2024 8:00 a.m.Happy Public Domain Day! Popeye, Rhapsody in Blue, The Sound and the Fury and Thousands of Other Captivating Creations Are Finally Free for Everyone to UseOn January 1, 2025, copyrights will expire for books, films, comic strips, musical compositions and other creative works from 1929, as well as sound recordings from 1924 Works entering the public domain includeThe Sound and the Fury, the first recordings ofRhapsody in Blue, Popeye, Tintin andThe Broadway Melody. Illustration by Emily Lankiewicz / Wikimedia Commons; Gabriel Hackett, MGM Studios, Movie Poster Image Art via Getty ImagesThe comic strip Thimble Theaterintroduced a new minor character on January 17, 1929. Two of the strips protagonists, Ham Gravy and Castor Oyl, find him at a seaport when they are looking for men to crew a ship. Hey there! Are you a sailor? Castor asks. The lanky man, who has a pipe in his mouth and an anchor tattooed on his oversized forearm, replies, Ja think Im a cowboy?The snarky sailor man was none other than Popeye, and these were his first words. Nearly a century after his debut, hell soon be able to say (almost) anything youd like him to. On January 1, 2025, Popeyealong with thousands of other copyrighted creationswill enter the public domain in the United States.Every year, Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University School of Laws Center for the Study of the Public Domain, publishes an exhaustive analysis of some of the most important works entering the public domain. This year, the list includes copyrighted titles from 1929 and sound recordings from 1924.Works enter the public domain when their copyrights expire, typically 95 years after publication. At that point, they become free for anyone to adapt or build upon without permissionwith a few caveats. Copyrights to audio recordings, meanwhile, expire 100 years after they were first put to wax.Take Mickey and Minnie Mouse, who first appeared in animated shorts like Steamboat WillieSimilarly, the copyright is expiring only on the version of Popeye introduced in 1929. He looks much like the character todays audiences recognize, with his bulging forearms, protruding chin and famous catchphrase (I yam what I yam, which he first uttered in November of that year). On the other hand, his memorable throaty grumble didnt exist until 1933, when Popeye the Sailor became an animated short, and he didnt start eating spinach to get him and his beloved Olive Oyl out of a jam until at least 1931.Betty Boop - 1933 - Popeye the SailorWatch on Before he found spinach, Popeye got his superhuman strength from an even weirder source: a whiffle hen named Bernice, who grants luck to anyone who rubs her feathers. In a June 1929 strip, Popeye survives 16 bullet wounds by petting Bernice, who saves his life and sculpts his magic muscles. So even though the hen-petting Popeye is in the public domain, the spinach-eating hero wont be fair game for a few years. (The same goes for his iconic theme song, which debuted in 1933.)Trademark law further complicates matters. Unlike copyrights, trademarks dont expire, and theyre designed to protect words or images linked to a specific brand. Hearst Holdings owns the trademark for the Popeye name and has filed applications to trademark certain graphical depictions of the sailor. Trademark law is all about preventing consumer confusion, and not about getting in the way of creativity, writes Jenkins on Dukes website. You can still legally put the 1929 Popeye character in a new creative work in a way that does not mislead purchasers into thinking they are getting a Hearst-branded product.What should 21st-century storytellers do with characters like Popeye? In recent years, filmmakers have developed a penchant for creating poorly reviewed live-action horror movies featuring beloved childrens cartoons, like Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) and The Mouse TrapPopeye the Slayer ManAs Jenkins points out, many of the celebrated classics entering the public domain this year were themselves built atop other public domain works. Disney featured more than a dozen copyright-free songs in its 1929 Mickey cartoons. William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury,Macbeth: [Life] is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing. Faulkner, Jenkins writes, is an author of a timeless work that took from the public domain and now gives back to it.Here are just a few of the renowned books, movies, musical compositions, sound recordings and artworks entering the public domain in 2025.First recordings of Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin1st RECORDING OF: Rhapsody In Blue - Paul Whiteman Orch. & George Gershwin piano (1924 version)Watch on Gershwin revolutionized American music and ushered in the Jazz Age, but the 25-year-old composer wrote his groundbreaking rhapsody rather hastily. He had been asked to compose a piece for a concert called An Experiment in Modern Music at New Yorks Aeolian Concert Hall in early 1924. Accounts differ regarding what happened next: Some say he agreed and then forgot, while others insist he was forced to agree after a premature report that he was at work on a jazz concerto appeared in the New York Tribune. In any case, Gershwin created a composition that masterfully melded elements of jazz and classical music in a matter of weeks, and its since been featured in everything from comedies to Disneys Fantasia 2000 to commercials. Today, many listeners can instantly recognize Rhapsody in Blue from its opening clarinet solo.The work itself entered the public domain five years ago, but the nearly nine-minute-long recording released later in 1924, featuring Gershwin himself as the piano soloist, is now available for public re-use. First-time listeners are struck by a bolt of optimism, wrote the New York Times upon its 100th anniversary earlier this year. A new day is here!Bolro by Maurice RavelWiener Philharmoniker - Maurice Ravel - Bolero - Regente Gustavo Dudamel (HD)Watch on Ravel, a French composer whose career blossomed at the turn of the 20th century yet spanned decades, is undoubtedly best known for a strange, hypnotic piece he wrote in his 50s. Bolro features a minimalist rhythm played on a snare drumand repeated throughout the 15-minute-long piece a total of 169 times. On top of the rhythm, different sections of the orchestra take turns playing two themes over and over again. Some find the repetition boring, but as a critic wrote in the SpectatorBolro.The perseverative composition was published in 1929, around the time that Ravel started experiencing symptoms of a neurological disorder. As it happens, perseveration is a term used to describe a tendency to repeat words and actions often observed in conditions like Alzheimers. In recent decades, scientists have started to wonder whether Ravel composed Bolro notbecause of it.Singin in the RainSinging in the Rain From "The Hollywood Revue of 1929"Watch on More than two decades before the eponymous musical, the song Singin in the Rain was first heard in the 1929 film The Hollywood Revue. One of the earliest sound pictures released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, it featured the studios biggest stars in a variety of short acts. One of those acts was Singin in the Rain, which opens with Cliff Edwards (who would later voice Jiminy Cricket in 1940s Pinocchio) strumming a ukulele as water pours down on stage. After about a minute, Edwards retires the instrument, and the production becomes a big dance numbernot too dissimilar from the rendition most viewers are familiar with today. The song returns in the finale, when the entire cast sings a jaunty reprise. The movie itself, naturally, also enters the public domain in 2025, which is why the song does as well.Its a peculiarity of copyright law, as explained by the Duke center, that the rule for sound recordings, with their 100-year copyright term, specifically excludes sounds accompanying motion pictures.A Room of Ones Own by Virginia Woolf As Virginia Woolf insisted in her 1929 essay, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Fine Art Images / Heritage Images via Getty ImagesWoolfs seminal 1929 essay is based on lectures she gave at Girton College and Newnham College, the first two womens colleges established at the University of Cambridge. When she was asked to speak, she realized she would be unable to fulfill the first duty of a lecturer, to hand you after an hours discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever. Instead, all she could offer were her thoughts on one small matter: A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.As Woolf points out, women had long been barred from pursuing an education or engaging in intellectual life. If William Shakespeare had had a sister who was just as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as the Bard, Woolf argues, said sister would have had no chance of attending school and learning basic grammar, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil, writes Woolf. Perhaps such a woman would have been pressured into an early marriageand would have ultimately killed herself, as Woolf herself would do in 1941.But on a longer time scale, Woolf was hopeful: In another century or so, if women have 500 [British pounds] a year each of us and rooms of our own and the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think, then perhaps the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeares sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down, writes Woolf in her conclusion. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway (second man from right) recovering at a hospital in Milan, Italy, during World War I. Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG via Getty ImagesSometimes lauded as the best American novel produced about World War I, Hemingways first best seller follows an American ambulance driver in Italy who is wounded by a mortar shell. While recovering in a Milan hospital, he falls in love with a nurse.Much of the novel is taken from Hemingways experience in the war. Like his protagonist, he drove an ambulance in Italy, and he was badly injured in the summer of 1918. During his hospital stay, a 19-year-old Hemingway fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a 26-year-old nurse. About a decade later, he drew from the love affair to write his novel, using his famously sparse style to convey a sense of muted disillusionment.The Broadway Melody Anita Page, Bessie Love and Charles King in The Broadway MelodyHulton Archive / Getty ImagesTwo years ago, Wings, the first film to win an Academy Award for best picture, entered the public domain. This year, historys second-ever Oscar winner will follow: The Broadway Melody, which is also the first sound film (and the first musical film) to win the honor. The picture follows two sisters who take their vaudeville act to Broadwayand become entangled in a love triangle along the way. MGM billed the film as an all talking, all singing, all dancing production, though it also released a silent version for theaters that lacked the equipment to show sound films. The New York TimesThe Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner American writer William Faulkner circa 1930 Bettmann via Getty ImagesFamous for its difficulty, Faulkners fourth novel chronicles the demise of the Compsons, an aristocratic family in Mississippi, from four perspectives. The Sound and the Fury is known for its stream-of-consciousness narration and nonlinear structure, and its celebrated as a pivotal Modernist text. In an interview several decades after its publication, Faulkner said that he initially tried to tell the story from the perspective of Benjy Compson, a man with an unnamed intellectual disability that muddles his sense of time, since I felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of knowing what happened, but not why. I saw that I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother. The published novel includes sections told by all three Compson sons and a third-person omniscient narrator.Tintin Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi at work on a TintinJacques Pavlovsky / Sygma via Getty ImagesThe Belgian newspaper Le Petit Vingtime began running a cartoon about a plucky young journalist named Tintin and his dog, Snowy (Milou, in the original French), in 1929. In the ensuing decades, Herg (the pen name of the celebrated Belgian cartoonist Georges Rmi) sent the boy reporter looking for adventureand exposing scandalsaround the globe. The cartoons have been translated into dozens of languages and adapted many times, including in the 2011 film The Adventures of Tintin, directed by Steven Spielberg, who acquired rights to the story after Hergs death in 1983. In the European Union, where copyright law protects works until 70 years after the creators death, Tintin wont enter the public domain until the 2050s. But in the U.S., anyone can send Tintin on his next adventure for free.New Mickey Mouse animationsMickey Mouse - The Opry House (HD)Watch on Mickey and Minnie Mouse debuted in a series of 1928 Disney shorts, including Steamboat Willie, one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound. When the characters first entered the public domain in January 2024a big day for avid copyright watchersthe public only gained access to the versions of the characters featured in the 1928 productions. Come 2025, 12 animations released in 1929 will follow. These include The Karnival Kid, in which Mickey speaks his first words (hot dogs!), and The Opry House, which shows Mickey wearing white gloves for the first time. (Whether Mickeys red shorts are protected by copyright is debatable, but even if they are, theyll enter the public domain in a few years, along with the first colorized Mickey cartoons from 1935.)Popeye Popeye didn't become a spinach-eating superhero until a few years after his debut. Paramount Pictures / Getty ImagesWhen the sailor man appeared in Thimble Theater in 1929, Segar thought he would be a minor character who exited the strip after a few months. But audiences couldnt get enough of Popeye, whose syndicated comic strip is still running to this day. Popeye is much more than a goofy comic character to me, said Segar in the book Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation. He represents all of my emotions, and he is an outlet for them. To me, Popeye is really a serious person, and when a serious person does something funnyits really funny.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: American History, American Writers, Art, Arts, Books, British Writers, Cartoons, children , Classical Music, Composers, Disney, Film, History, Law, Literature, Movies, Music, Musical Theater, Pop culture, Songs, World War I, Writers