These 1924 Copyrighted Works Will Go Into the Public Domain in 2020

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For the second year in a row, on January 1, thousands of copyrighted classics are made public. Under US law, works published at any time in 1924 will enter the public domain on January 1, 2020. This includes books, films, artwork, sheet music, and other specific creative works – but, unfortunately, not audio recordings. Below are some of the most important uncopyrighted works.

This used to happen every year. But in 1998, the Copyright Extension Act (aka the Sonny Bono Act or the Mickey Mouse Protection Act) extended copyright protection for existing works by 20 years, freezing the growth of the public domain. This expansion is finally over and new works will now be released into the public domain every year.

You can use the following works however you want in accordance with copyright law. You can download them, copy, share, translate, extract from them, remix them, perform them or adapt them for other media without permission. (Double check the publication date of a work before using it.) If it’s transformative enough, your new work is copyrighted. (This is why you can copy Pride and Prejudice , but not Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies .)

In theory, you could put your name on these works and pretend they’re yours without breaking copyright laws, but you’d look like an idiot.

The public domain allows Disney to turn fairy tales into films. It allows people to perform Shakespeare without royalties. This allows the orchestras to play Beethoven. It’s okay when creative works are made public. Let’s take advantage of this.

Cinema

These are all short films and feature films (mostly silent), including:

  • Sherlock Jr and Buster Keaton’s navigator
  • Shy Girl and Hot Water starring Harold Lloyd
  • Keaton’s Shorts, Laurel & Hardy and Our Gang (later Little Rascals)
  • Arbuckle’s stupid but brave fat man
  • ” America and Isn’t Life Beautiful” by D. W. Griffith
  • Clark Gable’s first appearance, The White Man (now lost) and the Forbidden Paradise
  • The first film adaptations of Peter Pan and the Age of Innocence
  • The first films produced by MGM, including ” He Who Gets a Slap” and ” Greed” by Erich von Stroheim.
  • A silent version of Infernal Dante , borrowed from the “Shown the mistake of his ways” plot from “A Christmas Carol .”
  • Baghdad thief starring Douglas Fairbanks (now open source)

Music

All these songs. These compositions are now in the public domain; any audio recordings of this year will not lose copyright until 2025 . Classics like:

  • Musical by George and Ira Gershwin ” Lady, Be Good!” including “Charming Rhythm” and “Oh Lady Be Good”
  • “Lazy” and “What will I do” by Irving Berlin
  • Alabama Bound
  • “California I’m Coming” by Al Jolson
  • “Does curly mint lose its taste overnight?”
  • “I will see you in my dreams”
  • “Everyone loves my baby”
  • “Why do you love me as you do?”
  • “It should have been you”
  • Jazz classic “Nobody’s Sweetheart”
  • Classic Blues by Ma Rainey “See See Rider”
  • “Someone Loves Me”

Classics such as:

  • Rhapsody by George Gershwin in blue
  • Ballet Eric Satie Relâche
  • Jan Sibelius Symphony No. 7
  • Opera Arnold Schoenberg Die glückliche Hand (Hand fate)
  • Opera by Giacomo Puccini ” Turandot”

And some more little-known songs whose titles I like:

  • “I am a little blackbird in search of a bluebird”
  • “Why did I kiss this girl?”
  • “Let me stay in your arms longer”
  • “Where lazy daisies grow”
  • “A new kind of man with a new love for me”
  • “Drink! Drink! Drink!”
  • “Prince of Wailing”
  • “When my sugar goes down the street”
  • “Doo Waka Doo”

Literature

All of these works , including these books:

  • Edgar Rice Burroughs ” Land Forgotten by Time” and ” Tarzan and the Ant-Men”
  • Agatha Christie’s film “The Man in the Brown Suit and Poirot’s Investigation”
  • Richard Connell’s Most Dangerous Game
  • VEB Dubois ” Gift of the Black People”
  • Ford Madox Ford Some Do Not … (1st volume of Parade’s End )
  • EM. Forster ” Travel to India”
  • Emma Goldman: My further disappointment in Russia
  • Preliminary version of the collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway ” In Our Time”
  • Bang-i-Dara Muhammad Iqbal
  • “The Unchanging Nymph” by Margaret Kennedy
  • The story of L.P. Lovecraft’s “Rats in the Walls”
  • Something Childish and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
  • Thomas Mann ” Magic Mountain”
  • Posthumously published book by Herman Melville Billy Budd
  • A. A. Milne when we were very young
  • Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
  • Autobiography of Mark Twain (posthumously)
  • Gertrude Chandler Warner ” Children in the Carriage” , the first book in the series
  • H.G. Wells’s dream
  • Edith Wharton “The Old Maid”
  • Ruth Plumley Thompson, Grandpa in Oz, 18 Oz Book

And these plays:

  • Bertold Brecht ” Life of Edward II of England” based on the novel by Marlowe.
  • Hay fever and easy behavior by Noel Coward
  • Eugene O’Neill’s wish under the elms

Artworks

  • Dempsey and Firpo by George Bellows
  • One of the sculptures ” Bird in Space” by Constantin Brancusi
  • Sidewalks of New York by Edward Hopper
  • Otto Dix Portrait of art dealer Johanna Hey
  • Contrasting sounds by Wassily Kandinsky
  • Asiatic god Paul Klee , Carnival in the mountains, Flower garden
  • Joan Miró’s first work in the episode ” Head of a Catalan Peasant”
  • ” Violon d’Ingres” by Man Ray
  • Diego Rivera mural Day of the Dead

Some of these works may already be in the public domain. This year, the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, and the New York Public Library worked together to create a searchable, public database of copyright status for works published from 1923 to 1964.

In most other countries, copyright is based on the date of death of the author and often expires earlier than if it were created in the United States. Wikipedia has a list of authors whose work will become public domain during 2020.

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