Steamboat Willie, Peter Pan among works to enter public domain in 2024

Jan. 1 each year is public domain day, welcoming a new batch of works that lose copyright protection.

This year, thousands of copyrighted works from 1928 will enter the United States’s public domain and be free for copying, sharing and remixing.

Long-awaited works entering public domain this year include Disney’s “Steamboat Willie,” which features the first drawings of Mickey Mouse, and “House at Pooh Corner,” introducing the Tigger character, as well as “Peter Pan” by J.M. Barrie.

Books by authors W.E.B. Du Bois, Agatha Christie, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Robert Frost will now be public domain, among thousands of others. The list includes films “Lights of New York” and Charlie Chaplin’s “The Circus.”  

Musical compositions available include Broadway songs, jazz standards, early blues and pop music such as Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love).”

Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without the creator granting permission or costing money.

The works were first set to be in the U.S. public domain in 1984, but their term as copyrighted materials was extended until 2004. They then were supposed to go into the public domain, but Congress added another 20-year pause and extended these works’ copyright term to 95 years, according to the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

This year, sound recordings from 1923 will also be available under public domain. The Music Modernization Act passed in 2022 released decades of sound recordings, but no more were released last year, the center noted.

While more than a century old, the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox will make the recordings available to download for users to remix or use in soundtracks.

The Center highlighted notable works entering the public domain in 2024, but it is just a fraction of the books, movies, musical compositions and song recordings that will be released.