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High profile lawsuits and gunshy labels killed that presumption, and today, sampling remains a gigantic, ugly mess:
Which is all to say that the ongoing growth of the public domain, after its 20-year coma, is a most welcome experience - but if you think the public domain is great, wait'll you see what fair use can do for creativity!
30/
There are some *spectacular* works that are being freed on January 1:
* Dashiell Hammett's *Maltese Falcon*
* Agatha Christie's *Murder at the Vicarage* (Miss Marple's debut)
* The first four Nancy Drew books
* The first Dick and Jane book
* TS Eliot's *Ash Wednesday*
* Olaf Stapledon's *Last and First Men*
* Sigmund Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* (in German)
* Somerset Maugham's *Cakes and Ale*
10/
* Bertrand Russell's *The Conquest of Happiness*
That's just a small selection from *thousands* of books.
Things are pretty amazing on the film side too: we're getting Academy Award winners like *All Quiet on the Western Front*, another Marx Brothers movie (*Animal Crackers*); the debut film appearance of two of the Three Stooges (*Soup To Nuts*); a Gary Cooper/Marlene Dietrich vehicle (*Morocco*); Garbo's first talkie (*Anna Christie*).
11/
There's John Wayne's big break (*Big Trail*); a Hitchcock (*Murder!*); Jean Harlow's debut (*Hell's Angels*, directed by Howard Hughes); and so, so many more.
Then there's music. On the composition side, there's some great Gershwins (*I Got Rhythm*, *I've Got a Crush on You*, *Embraceable You*). There's Hoagy Carmichael's *Georgia On My Mind*. There's *Dream a Little Dream of Me*, *Sunny Side of the Street*, *Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight*, *Just a Gigolo*.
12/
There's a Sousa march, *The Royal Welch Fusiliers*.
There's also some banger recordings: Marian Anderson's *Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen*; Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong's *St Louis Blues*; Clarence Williams’ Blue Five's *Everybody Loves My Baby (but My Baby Don't Love Nobody but Me)*; Louis Armstrong's *If I Lose, Let me Lose*; and (again) so many more!
13/
On top of that, there's a bunch of 2D art, including a Mondrian, a Klee, and a ton more work from 1930, which means a lot of Deco, Constructivism, and Neoplasticism. As a collagist, I find this *very* exciting:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/03/cannier-valley/#bricoleur
As with previous editions, Jenkins and Boyle use this year's public domain report as a jumping-off point to explain some of the gnarlier aspects of copyright law.
14/
This year's *casus belli* is the bizarre copyright status of Betty Boop.
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/#boopanchor
On January 1, the first Betty Boop cartoon, *Dizzy Dishes*, will enter the public domain. But there are many aspects of Betty Boop that are *already* in the public domain, because the copyright on many *later* Boop cartoons was never renewed - until 1976, copyright holders were required to file some paperwork at fixed intervals to extend the copyright on their works.
15/
This is a small personal instance of Bonfire in the Fediverse.
