https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/
"On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 will enter the US
public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They will be free for all
to copy, share, and build upon. 2025 marks a milestone: all of the books,
films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The
literary highlights from 1929 include
The Sound and the Fury by William
Faulkner,
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and
A Room of One’s Own
by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx
Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred
Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the
original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the
newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s
An American in Paris, Ravel’s
Bolero, Fats Waller’s
Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number
Singin’ in
the Rain. Below is just a handful of the works that will be in the US public
domain in 2025. To find more material from 1929, you can visit the Catalogue of
Copyright Entries.
The title of Faulkner’s novel was itself taken from a public domain work,
Shakespeare’s
Macbeth, and its lament over the seeming meaningless of life.
“Life…is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying
nothing.”
The Sound and the Fury was published on October 7, 1929, on the eve
of the Great Depression. Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.
During those intervening twenty years the world had witnessed unspeakable
horrors: economic crises had fueled the rise of authoritarianism and
totalitarianism. Then came World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
and the beginnings of the Cold War. In August of 1949, the Soviet Union tested
its first atomic weapon. A book written in the shadow of economic disaster was
being celebrated after worldwide catastrophe and in the shadow of the mushroom
cloud. Despite all of that, Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel acceptance speech sounded a
note of defiant optimism, and an uncompromising defense of role of art in
helping us understand ourselves and our time:
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal,
not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because
he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things…The poet’s
voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the
pillars to help him endure and prevail.
“Not merely the record of man, but one of the pillars that helps him prevail.”
Words written by the author of a timeless work that took from the public domain
and now gives back to it. In an historical moment when many are inclined to
despair, to believe that the problems and divisions of our society are too
intractable, too complex for hope, Faulkner speaks to us of “the old universal
truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and
pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” But Faulkner’s work was neither
ephemeral nor doomed. To use his words again, “The past is never dead. It’s not
even past.” Why care about the public domain? That is why."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
