Many 1929 cultural works have now gone into the public domain, including tracks like ‘Singin’ In The Rain’ and ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’, as well as characters like Popeye and TinTin.
This comes as 95 year pieces of intellectual property lose their copyright protection, meaning that those wanting to use them or their likeness no longer need to seek out permission. Now, as the new year has started, a whole new bunch of material has reached the 95 year mark and has made it into the public domain.
As highlighted by Duke University, this includes a huge number of songs that were originally published in 1929. One of the most famous is the classic track ‘Singin’ In The Rain’, which was written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown for Broadway’s Hollywood Music Box Revue. It also appeared in the film The Hollywood Revue Of 1929, which arrived that same year. Both the song and film are in the public domain as of 2025.
Other tracks include Fats Waller, Harry Brooks and Andy Paul Razaf’s ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ and ‘(What Did I Do To Be So) Black And Blue’, alongside Cole Porter’s ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’, and Jimmie Rodgers’ ‘Waiting For A Train’.
George Gershwin’s ‘An American In Paris’ is also listed, as is Jack Yellen and Milton Ager’s ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, Alfred Dubin and Joseph Burke’s ‘Tiptoe Through The Tulips’, and Maurice Ravel’s ‘Boléro’.
As explained by Stereogum, the actual compositions are now in the public domain, but things like Louis Armstrong’s 1929 version of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ are not. This is because actual sound recordings take a century to lose copyright protection.
Because of this, that means a number of sound recordings from 1924 are now free to the public domain, including Al Jolson’s ‘California Here I Come’, George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody In Blue’ and Marian Anderson’s ‘My Way’s Cloudy’.
Books from 1929 that are now in the public domain include Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms, and William Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury. Films now free of copyright protection include Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, John Ford’s The Black Watch, Gold Diggers Of Broadway and more.
Famous fictional characters are free to use too, including Popeye The Sailor, which first appeared in a daily comic strip called Thimble Theatre in January 1929 (via Consequence), and TinTin and his dog Snowy, who debuted in Belgium’s in Le Petit Vingtième that same year.
Their entry into the public domain – alongside thousands of other previously copyrighted works from that year – mean that their likeness and character is free to use and adapt in film, video games and more. This could lead to some unconventional uses arising, similar to that of the Winnie The Pooh horror films that popped up in recent years.
Consequence reports that, like Winnie The Pooh, some horror directors are already thinking up ideas for films including Popeye and three separate movies based on the character are already being created.
Back in 2023, Winnie The Pooh horror flick Blood And Honey scored a one-star review from NME‘s James Mottram. Mottram wrote: “Dressed in dungarees and a lumberjack shirt, Pooh looks nothing like how you’ll remember him from the Disney cartoons (as the Mouse House still hold the copyright to those). True, it’s a clever loophole the director has exploited, but that’s as far as it goes. Blood And Honey is a sticky mess of a movie.”