Here Are The Famous Works That Are Now Public Domain (And Soon, Mickey Mouse May Be, Too)

Back in 1998, Congress extended copyrights an extra 20 years with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, in many people’s estimation a move to protect Disney’s copyright on Mickey Mouse (which currently expires, in part, in 2024). For 20 years, all of those works from 1923 have been protected by the copyright extension, which some assumed Congress would extend again last year. But Congress has been busy (or the exact opposite of busy), so on January 1st, thousands of works — movies, paintings, books, comic strips, etc. — published in 1923 are now in the public domain, free to republish, distribute, and remix, as long as your local laws don’t prohibit it.

There are some exceptions, however. Some early sound recordings are still under copyright, although the courts have recently cleared several pre-1972 recordings and the “Happy Birthday” song for public use. Some books published in 1923 will still be under copyright if the author didn’t sign off on the publication of their work until later.

So what entered the public domain this week Here’s just a short list of some of the more notable works:

MOVIES / SHORT FILMS:

CARTOONS / COMICS:

PLAYS:

SONGS:

BOOKS:

ART:

As for Mickey Mouse, the earliest “Steamboat Willie” version of the character — black, gray, and white, and missing the white gloves — is set to enter the public domain on January 1st, 2024, although we’ll see if Disney allows that to happen.

Other huge intellectual properties set to go into the public domain over the next few years if Congress doesn’t intervene are George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (2020), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (2021), and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (2022). Between 2031 and 2035, copyrights are set to expire on Superman, Batman, Snow White (Disney movie version), and many of the Looney Tunes characters.

A larger list of newly public domain works (with direct links to some of them) is available at Duke.