Each Pub­lic Domain Day seems to bring us a rich­er crop of copy­right-lib­er­at­ed books, plays, films, musi­cal com­po­si­tions, sound record­ings, works of art, and oth­er pieces of intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty. This year hap­pens to be an espe­cial­ly notable one for con­nois­seurs of Bel­gian cul­ture. Among the char­ac­ters enter­ing the Amer­i­can pub­lic domain, we find a cer­tain boy reporter named Tintin, who first appeared — along with his faith­ful pup Milou, or in Eng­lish, Snowy — in the Jan­u­ary 10th, 1929 issue of Le Petit Vingtième, the chil­dren’s sup­ple­ment of the news­pa­per Le Vingtième Siè­cle.

Now, here in le vingt-et-unième-siè­cle, that first ver­sion of Tintin can be rein­vent­ed in any man­ner one can imag­ine — at least in the Unit­ed States. In the Euro­pean Union, as the Duke Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain direc­tors Jen­nifer Jenk­ins and James Boyle note in their Pub­lic Domain Day blog post for this year, that Tintin remains under copy­right until 2054, a date based on his cre­ator Hergé hav­ing died in 1983. The thor­ough­ly Amer­i­can com­ic-strip hero Pop­eye also made his debut in 1929, but as Jenk­ins and Boyle has­ten to add, while that “Pop­eye 1.0 had super­hu­man capa­bil­i­ties, he did not derive them from eat­ing spinach until 1931.” Even so, “it appears that the copy­right in this 1931 com­ic strip was not renewed — if this is true, Popeye’s spinach-fueled strength is already in the pub­lic domain.”

This year also brings a devel­op­ment in a sim­i­lar mat­ter of detail relat­ed to no less a car­toon icon than Mick­ey Mouse: last year freed the first ver­sion of Mick­ey Mouse, his riv­er-nav­i­gat­ing, farm-ani­mal-bash­ing Steam­boat Willie incar­na­tion. “In 2025 we wel­come a dozen new Mick­ey Mouse films from 1929,” write Jenk­ins and Boyle, “Mick­ey speaks his first words – ‘Hot dogs! Hot dogs!’ – and debuts his famil­iar white gloves. That ver­sion of Mick­ey is now offi­cial­ly in the pub­lic domain.”

This Pub­lic Domain Day also brings us lit­er­ary works like Faulkn­er’s The Sound and the Fury, Hem­ing­way’s A Farewell to Arms, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (as well as detec­tive nov­els from Agatha Christie and the pseu­do­ny­mous Ellery Queen, once the biggest mys­tery writer in Amer­i­ca); the first sound films by Alfred Hitch­cock, John Ford, and the Marx Broth­ers; musi­cal com­po­si­tions like “Sin­gin’ in the Rain,” Gersh­win’s An Amer­i­can in Paris, and Rav­el’s Boléro; actu­al record­ings of Rhap­sody in Blue and “It Had To Be You”; and Sur­re­al­ist works of art by Sal­vador Dalí and — pend­ing fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion into their copy­right sta­tus — per­haps even René Magritte, whose L’empire des lumières just sold for a record $121 mil­lion. Who knows? 2025 could be the year we all look to Bel­gium for inspi­ra­tion.

For more on what’s enter­ing the pub­lic domain today, vis­it this Duke Uni­ver­si­ty web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hergé Draws Tintin in Vin­tage Footage (and What Explains the Character’s Endur­ing Appeal)

An Intro­duc­tion to René Magritte, and How the Bel­gian Artist Used an Ordi­nary Style to Cre­ate Extra­or­di­nar­i­ly Sur­re­al Paint­ings

William Faulkn­er Reads His Nobel Prize Speech

Alfred Hitch­cock Presents Some of the First Words Ever Spo­ken on Film .… and They’re Saucy Ones (1929)

An Ear­ly Ver­sion of Mick­ey Mouse Enters the Pub­lic Domain on Jan­u­ary 1, 2024

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2024: Enjoy Clas­sic Works by Vir­ginia Woolf, Char­lie Chap­lin, Buster Keaton, D. H. Lawrence, Bertolt Brecht & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.