Each Public Domain Day seems to bring us a richer crop of copyright-liberated books, plays, films, musical compositions, sound recordings, works of art, and other pieces of intellectual property. This year happens to be an especially notable one for connoisseurs of Belgian culture. Among the characters entering the American public domain, we find a certain boy reporter named Tintin, who first appeared — along with his faithful pup Milou, or in English, Snowy — in the January 10th, 1929 issue of Le Petit Vingtième, the children’s supplement of the newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle.
Now, here in le vingt-et-unième-siècle, that first version of Tintin can be reinvented in any manner one can imagine — at least in the United States. In the European Union, as the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain directors Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle note in their Public Domain Day blog post for this year, that Tintin remains under copyright until 2054, a date based on his creator Hergé having died in 1983. The thoroughly American comic-strip hero Popeye also made his debut in 1929, but as Jenkins and Boyle hasten to add, while that “Popeye 1.0 had superhuman capabilities, he did not derive them from eating spinach until 1931.” Even so, “it appears that the copyright in this 1931 comic strip was not renewed — if this is true, Popeye’s spinach-fueled strength is already in the public domain.”
This year also brings a development in a similar matter of detail related to no less a cartoon icon than Mickey Mouse: last year freed the first version of Mickey Mouse, his river-navigating, farm-animal-bashing Steamboat Willie incarnation. “In 2025 we welcome a dozen new Mickey Mouse films from 1929,” write Jenkins and Boyle, “Mickey speaks his first words – ‘Hot dogs! Hot dogs!’ – and debuts his familiar white gloves. That version of Mickey is now officially in the public domain.”
This Public Domain Day also brings us literary works like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (as well as detective novels from Agatha Christie and the pseudonymous Ellery Queen, once the biggest mystery writer in America); the first sound films by Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and the Marx Brothers; musical compositions like “Singin’ in the Rain,” Gershwin’s An American in Paris, and Ravel’s Boléro; actual recordings of Rhapsody in Blue and “It Had To Be You”; and Surrealist works of art by Salvador Dalí and — pending further investigation into their copyright status — perhaps even René Magritte, whose L’empire des lumières just sold for a record $121 million. Who knows? 2025 could be the year we all look to Belgium for inspiration.
For more on what’s entering the public domain today, visit this Duke University website.
Related Content:
Hergé Draws Tintin in Vintage Footage (and What Explains the Character’s Enduring Appeal)
William Faulkner Reads His Nobel Prize Speech
An Early Version of Mickey Mouse Enters the Public Domain on January 1, 2024
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
