On January 1, 2024, thousands of copyrighted works from 1928 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1923. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. This year’s highlights include Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence and The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman and Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, and a trove of sound recordings from 1923. And, of course, 2024 marks the long-awaited arrival of Steamboat Willie – featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse – into the public domain. That story is so fascinating, so rich in irony, so rife with misinformation about what you will be able to do with Mickey and Minnie now that they are in the public domain that it deserved its own article, “Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle.” Why is it a love triangle? What rights does Disney still have? How is trademark law involved? Read all about it here.

Here is just a handful of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2024.  They were first set to go into the public domain after a 56-year term in 1984, but a term extension pushed that date to 2004. They were then supposed to go into the public domain in 2004, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit another 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years.  Now the wait is over. To find more material from 1928, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.

• D.H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
• Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (in the original German, Die Dreigroschenoper)
• Virginia Woolf, Orlando
• Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (in the original German, Im Westen nichts Neues)
• W.E.B. Du Bois, Dark Princess
• Claude McKay, Home to Harlem
• A. A. Milne, illustrations by E. H. Shepard, House at Pooh Corner (introducing the Tigger character)
• J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (because it was not “published” for copyright purposes until 1928)[4]
• Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
• Evelyn Waugh,Decline and Fall
• Agatha Christie, The Mystery of the Blue Train
• Wanda Gág, Millions of Cats (the oldest American picture book still in print)
• Robert Frost, West-Running Brook
• Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, The Front Page

Source

Public Domain Day 2024 by Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

To take a deep dive into the Public Domain click here.