Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Every January 1, in the USA, a number of copyrighted works lose their protection and become public domain! This year has a pretty neat list - Dashiell Hammett! Miss Marple! The Marx Brothers! Lots of neat things.

And obviously this isn't everything that's coming free of copyright protection, just a list of a few of some significant works. They're already free in some countries: Canada and Australia have shorter copyright terms.

BOOKS
Cakes and Ale
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (the full book version)
Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage (the first novel featuring Miss Marple)
Carolyn Keene (pseudonym for Mildred Benson), the first four Nancy Drew books, beginning with The Secret of the Old Clock
Watty Piper (pen name of Arnold Munk), The Little Engine That Could (the popular illustrated version, with drawings by Lois Lenski)
William H. Elson, Elson Basic Readers (the first appearances of Dick and Jane)
Noël Coward, Private Lives
T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies
John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel
Edna Ferber, Cimarron
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
J. B. Priestley, Angel Pavement
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (in the original German, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur)
Elizabeth Coatsworth (author) and Lynd Ward (illustrator), The Cat Who Went to Heaven
Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons
W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale
Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

CHARACTERS, COMICS, CARTOONS
Flip the Frog
Betty Boop from Fleischer Studios' Dizzy Dishes and other cartoons
Rover (later renamed Pluto) from Disney's The Chain Gang (as an unnamed bloodhound) and The Picnic (as Rover)
Blondie and Dagwood from the Blondie comic strips by Chic Young
Flip the Frog from Fiddlesticks and other cartoons, by Ub Iwerks after he left Disney
Nine new Mickey Mouse cartoons, the initial week of Mickey Mouse comic strips, and ten new Silly Symphonies cartoons from Disney

FILMS
The Divorcee
All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Lewis Milestone (winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture)
King of Jazz, directed by John Murray Anderson (musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman and Bing Crosby’s first feature-film appearance)
Cimarron, directed by Wesley Ruggles (winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, registered for copyright in 1930)
Animal Crackers, directed by Victor Heerman (starring the Marx Brothers)
Soup to Nuts, directed by Benjamin Stoloff (written by Rube Goldberg, featuring later members of The Three Stooges)
Morocco, directed by Josef von Sternberg (starring Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, and Adolphe Menjou)
The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel), directed by Josef von Sternberg (starring Marlene Dietrich)
Anna Christie, directed by Clarence Brown (Greta Garbo’s first talkie)
Hell's Angels, directed by Howard Hughes (Jean Harlow’s film debut)
The Big Trail, directed by Raoul Walsh (John Wayne’s first leading role)
The Big House, directed by George Hill
Murder!, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
L'Âge d'Or, directed by Luis Buñuel, written by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí
Free and Easy, directed by Edward Sedgwick (Buster Keaton’s first speaking role)
The Divorcee, directed by Robert Z. Leonard
Whoopee!, directed by Thornton Freeland

MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS
The Royal Welch Fusiliers
Four Songs - I Got Rhythm, I've Got a Crush on You, But Not for Me, and Embraceable You - with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, music by George Gershwin
Georgia on My Mind, lyrics by Stuart Gorrell, music by Hoagy Carmichael
Dream a Little Dream of Me, lyrics by Gus Kahn, music by Fabian Andre and Wilbur Schwandt
Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight, lyrics by Al Lewis, music by Al Sherman
On the Sunny Side of the Street, lyrics by Dorothy Fields, music by Jimmy McHugh
It Happened in Monterey, lyrics by Billy Rose, music by Mabel Wayne
Body and Soul, lyrics by Edward Heyman, Robert Sour, Frank Eyton, music by Johnny Green
Just a Gigolo (the first English translation), original German lyrics by Julius Brammer, English translation by Irving Caesar, music by Leonello Casucci
You're Driving Me Crazy, lyrics and music by Walter Donaldson
Beyond the Blue Horizon, lyrics by Leo Robin, music by Richard A. Whiting and W. Franke Harling (possible inspiration for the Star Trek theme song)
The Royal Welch Fusiliers, by John Philip Sousa

Lots of good stuff that creative types can play with without fear of any sort of legal reprisal! The first appearance of Betty Boop, and the original version of Disney's Pluto, then called Rover. It's interesting to see the evolutions of characters, like how Mickey evolved from Steamboat Willy.

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/01/1712212/public-domain-day-2026-brings-betty-boop-nancy-drew-and-i-got-rhythm-into-the-commons

Thank you, Disney and The Mouse. [/sarcasm]

Yes, thanks to Disney and Cher's ex-husband slamming into a tree while skiing, copyright got extended and for 20 years, in the USA, nothing was released into the public domain to protect Steamboat Willy. Well, this year that changes. Doesn't mean that Disney won't be gearing up for other changes and exclusions, but at least for now we'll be getting something.

Among new (almost century old) material getting released:
--Poems of Robert Frost
--Plays of Oscar Wilde
--Writings of Winston Churchill
--Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments
and lots of other stuff

A lot of this was already available on sites like Project Gutenberg in Canada and Australia, just not here.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/first-time-20-years-copyrighted-works-enter-public-domain-180971016/