The universal stars of comics Tintin and Popeye, masterpieces of literature, cinema and music by Faulkner, Hemingway, Hitchcock, Ravel, Gershwin – all dated 1929 – entered the American public domain on Wednesday.
Every January 1, thousands of books, films, songs, music, works of art, comic book characters, 95 years old, lose their copyright in the United States.
Which means they can be freely copied, shared, reproduced or adapted without a penny being paid.
It is the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at the Duke University Law School, in North Carolina (southeast), which makes public the list of cultural works passed down to posterity each year at the end of December.
This January 1, the stars are the sailor Popeye, created in 1929 by the American Elzie Crisler Segar, and the reporter Tintin, presented by the Belgian Hergé the same year.
“In recent years, we have celebrated the entry into the public domain of fascinating characters like Mickey Mouse (2024) and Winnie the Pooh (2022),” recalls the director of the Center, Jennifer Jenkins, on her site. “In 2025, copyrights expire for more incarnations of Mickey dating from 1929 and the first versions of Popeye and Tintin,” says the lawyer.
“The Adventures of Tintin” has been adapted for cinema many times, notably in 2011 by Steven Spielberg.
The year 1929 was also that of major works of American and European literature of which there are several screen adaptations.
Thus the legendary works “The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner, “A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway, “A Room of One’s Own” by the British Virginia Woolf, or the first English translation of “A l ‘West, nothing new’ by the German Erich Maria Remarque.
These novels also entered the American public domain this Wednesday.
On the cinema side, Duke University selected “Blackmail” by Alfred Hitchcock, the first British talking film, and “The Black Guard”, the first non-silent feature film by the American John Ford, both dated 1929.
In song and music, the first version of “Singin’ in the Rain” by Americans Ignacio Herbert Brown and Arthur Freed, adapted many times, also lost its copyright.
Just like the famous “Boléro” by Frenchman Maurice Ravel and “An American in Paris” by George Gershwin, composed in 1928 but whose copyrights date from the following year.
