January 1, 2026 is Public Domain day for 1930

Cafe Society
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Last year I started a thread: January 1, 2025 is Public Domain day for 1929. Time to update.

Copyright law today puts anything that is over 95 years old into public domain. For ease of handling, all of 1929 1930 goes into the public domain as of January 1 in the 95th year. That means on January 1, 2025 2026 all works from 1929 1930 are in the public domain. Sound recordings are under a separate law and go into the public domain after 100 years, so that applies to 1925 recordings.

A long list of books, movies, art, comics, and more is available here.

1930 means the first full year of historic talkies. All Quiet on the Western Front, The Blue Angel, Anna Christie, Best Picture winner Cimmaron, Animal Crackers, and even L’Âge d’Or.

The year was full of books taught in schools, like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel. But most people will know the Golden Age mysteries: Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Christie’s first Miss Marple, The Murder at the Vicarage, Sayer’s Strong Poison, Queen’s The French Powder Mystery, and the first four Nancy Drew books. Classic sf novels are a shorter list but include Olaf Stapledon’s First and Last Men, Philip Wylie’s Gladiator, a major influence for Superman, and E. E. Smith’s Skylark Three.

Blondie and Dagwood along with Betty Boop were introduced in 1930, but only their characteristics from that year rather than later drawings are covered for imitators. The actual comic strips and cartoons can be reproduced freely, though.

I don’t remember seeing a flood of 1929 works being reprinted this year. Maybe these names have disappeared into history. Personally, I’ve always thought 95 years was too long for copyright partly because of this historic forgetfulness. Just have to see what happens in 2026.

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Thanks for all this.

Ref this bit

the obvious point is “too long for who?”

If the goal is to ensure the original author and publisher are able to wring substantially 100% of the commercial potential out of a property, then releasing it to the public domain after historic forgetfulness has set in is the right answer.

Supposedly copyright is meant to balance the interests of creators and consumers. ISTM at least in the USA creators and their corporate masters long ago captured then coerced that decision-making process into their favor.

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I agree that copyright should balance consumers and creators. Which is like saying that the law should balance freedom and constraint. A nice thought, but fiendishly complicated down in the details.

The details inevitably include knowledge of who owns the copyright. Reality tells us that except for certain famous and/or corporate items, that knowledge is easy to lose, resulting in what are called orphan books and their equivalents in other media. I’d guess that the majority of works of all types issued in the last 95 years are orphans. That’s a huge loss, an ocean of creativity with a bare few islands of ownership. Digital works are probably worse off than physical media in this regard.

I’ve watched this play out since the Copyright Act of 1976, which created a 75-year copyright. Millions of words have been dumped on the issue in the last 50 years, and no good answers have been found, and nothing has reached consensus. Right now the issues are so contentious that no Congress would dare touch them. I think that staying at 75 years would have been better. Is that the right number? No clue.

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Great, I bet someone’s working on Betty Boop horror.

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It’s not that much of a stretch. Aesthetically, the hit horror video game series Bendy and the Ink Machine already looks like a Betty Boop cartoon.

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There was arguably some horror in the original cartoons, like Minnie the Moocher and The Old Man of the Mountain.

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I think Millions of Cats, the Wanda Gag classic, enters.

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I find it interesting just how pupular some now barely noticed things used to be. In the early 20th century there were twenty-eight Dagwood and Blondie movies. It was the MCU of the 1940s!

Or how about a live-action movie about Nazis attempting to steal Snuffy Smith’s moonshine?

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Seems like brand extension of media properties is not a new idea. The term might be new, but the idea is not.

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They figured this out real early. One of my favorite examples is Percy Crosby’s comic strip Skippy, about a mischievous boy. It ran for years, and then in this early talkie period was made into hit movie of that name, starring Jackie Coogan. A sequel followed in 1932 and so did a radio serial also named Skippy. And so did the peanut butter we all know still called Skippy.

Then in 1933, Wheaties put Skippy’s face on its boxes, and inserted one of a collectible set of 12 cards featuring Skippy playing various sports. This is said to be the first premium inserted into cereal boxes, a device that would boom in the next couple of decades.

You’d think Crosby became a zillionaire from all this. But the Skippy peanut butter used the name without permission and continued even after Crosby won a lawsuit. He spent all his money on lawyers, both on this and on a bitter divorce, took up drinking, and was eventually committed to an asylum. He died poor, broken, and forgotten.

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Choosy mothers choose Jif.

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From what I read of it, the recent Betty Boop Broadway musical might count.

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The vultures have started picking over the bones.

Return of the Maltese Falcon (2026)
A novel by Max Allan Collins

Hardboiled noir that picks up where legendary author Dashiell Hammett left off, telling the story of iconic private eye Sam Spade and the quest for the priceless Maltese Falcon.

THE GREATEST PRIVATE EYE OF ALL TIME RETURNS TO FINISH THE JOB

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The Little Engine that Could RETURNS TO FINISH THE JOB

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I’d call it a pre-television sitcom series.

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Have they already optioned The Maltese Falcon Strikes Again?

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Son of The Maltese Falcon meets the Bride of the Thin Man.

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Nancy Drew and the missing Maltese Falcon…

Brian

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Together, they fight crime in the feel-good comedy of the year.

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Anything on Doc Savage?

Or Weird Tales stuff?