I think #PublicDomainDay2026 is much better than last year. We got some heavy hitters this year:
Betty Boop
Nancy Drew
All Quiet on the Western Front
Animal Crackers (Marx Brothers)
King of Jazz
The Big Trail (opening scenes allegedly the greatest made in Hollywood up to 1930)
Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight
Just a Gigolo
Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow
It's #PublicDomainDay! Check out the new shared culture we are free to do anything we want with. We can download and even remix this culture. I will be checking out:
- King of Jazz, a dazzling ~$40 million musical with inventive video compositions. Such compositions fell out of fashion within a couple years, and in my experience are rarer in movies from the next decade.
- The Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers
- The Little Engine that Could
- Betty Boop toons
- best picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front
Wikipedia and Archive.org are usually good sources for the best quality versions of these movies and shorts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Jazz
If your head is spinning from all the complexities involved here, congratulations! You are in good company. This is another reason why copyright expiration is so important: It brings clarity. There can be multiple separate copyrights implicated in a single creative work – over characters, audiovisual content, music, and so on. During a copyright term that lasts almost 100 years, those multiple rights may have changed hands many times and may no longer be owned by a single entity, or indeed by any entity we can identify. It can be incredibly difficult to figure out who owns what. When entire works become #PublicDomain, they are free for reuse without having to untangle this web of ownership.
January 1, 2026 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1930 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1925! By Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle[1] CC BY 4.0 Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different.[2] On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925.
TIL there's a Beatles Protection Act that mysteriously pauses the #PublicDomain from 1947 for 10 years. Elvis, Beatles, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, and others breathe a sigh of relief, as the government continues their monopoly for another decade.
The Music Modernization Act’s “Classics Protection and Access Act” established a timeline for old recordings to enter the public domain. Recordings first published between 1923–1946 are public domain in January 2024–2047 (the year after a 100-year term). Then there is a ten-year pause from 2048–2058. After that, recordings first published between 1947–1956 are public domain in January 2058–2067, after a 110-year term.
BigHeadMode