The earliest surviving film work of the Marx Brothers, the first talkie films from several notable silent film stars and the earliest versions of the comic strip characters Popeye and Tintin are all entering the public domain today.
The coming of a new year means that that numerous works of art, specifically, any work that was published 96 years ago, in this case 1929 – be it literature, music or film – will become part of the public domain as their copyright protection expires under United States law.
In terms of films, landmark movies like The Marx Brothers’ first released film The Cocoanuts, MGM’s two big musical variety films The Broadway Melody and The Hollywood Revue Of 1929 and Buster Keaton’s final full-length feature as a director, Spite Marriage, will all become public domain. Joining them will be all the other films from a year which saw Hollywood in the full transition from silent films to talkies with the first sound work coming from silent stars and directors like Harold Lloyd (Welcome Danger), Alfred Hitchcock (Blackmail), John Ford (The Black Watch) and Cecil B. DeMille (Dynamite). The landmark early entry in Black American cinema, King Vidor’s Hallelujah, one of the first films from a major studio to feature an all African-American cast, also enters the public domain.
Additionally, all the short stories, novellas, novels and plays that were published in 1929 are now available to filmmakers to adapt freely. That would include such titles as Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury, Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front, Patrick Hamilton’s stage play Rope and the first Ellery Queen novel The Roman Hat Mystery.
Songs going into the public domain this year include Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” George Gershwin’s “An American In Paris,” Ravel’s “Boléro,” Razaf, Brooks and Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and many more. Now it should be noted that just because a song is in the public domain, that doesn’t mean a recording of the song is public domain as well. Through a quirk in copyright law, sound recordings have a copyright lifespan of 100 years, meaning that recordings from 1924 are the ones entering the public domain this January 1.
The practicality of allowing copywritten works to expire is that it frees the works up to used in by new generations of creators and artists in new and various ways. It was intended by the Founding Fathers to move a work from benefiting just its creators and their heirs to benefiting a new generation of artists and academics.
Now their is a potential for trouble that comes when one forgets to factor in the uniqueness of the iteration of the public domain character. Certain characteristics attributable to a specific public domain character but were added later i successive works may still fall under copyright. For example, while the character of Popeye enters into the public domain on January 1, 2025 – thanks to his first appearing in the January 17, 1929 installment of the newspaper comic strip Thimble Theatre, he didn’t acquire his iconic love for spinach for another two and a half years until June 1931. Meaning that for now, anyone who uses Popeye in a new manner has to do so in a way that does not see him resorting to his leafy power boost.
This is similar to a situation that exists for any filmmaker wanting to adapt L Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz books. All of the original series of children’s books that Baum wrote have been in the public domain for several years, with Glinda Of Oz, published in 1920, being the last to enter in 1996. They can adapt the stories as freely as they want; however, they can not incorporate certain elements that are specific, say, to the classic 1939 MGM film The Wizard Of Oz. That would include Dorothy’s blue and white check dress and the magical ruby slippers. The magical footwear was silver in the book however, with MGM changingd them to ruby-encrusted because the red would look better in Technicolor. For Disney’s 1985 film Return To Oz, the studio reportedly paid a hefty sum to MGM for the use ruby slippers instead of the more book accurate silver ones, because such was the public’s perception of how the slippers were supposed to look. But Wicked, from Gregory Maguire’s original novel through to its Broadway musical adaptation and its subsequent new film version, chose to stay with Baum’s original silver slippers. The legal ability to copyright certain presentations based off of public domain source material looks to have its origins in a 2011 court case involving the MGM Wizard Of Oz film. If there are no future revisions to the US copyright law, MGM’s version of The Wizard Of Oz will go into the public domain at the start of 2035, in which case those elements unique to the film like the ruby slippers will become fair game.
Copyright expiration is an important part of the life cycle of culture. There are many forgotten works that online resources like The Guttenberg Project, Google Books or the Internet Archives will be able to make available to everyone free of charge as this new year begins. How will scholars and those who create online use this new material? Who can say, but it should be interesting to find out.
