Public domain image of Steamboat Willy: a mouse wearing a hat, short pants, and shoes at the helm of a steamboat. Yellow and dark blue, the image has been telescoped and repeated to give the impression of an expanding photo. Image by John Morgenstern.
Emory Libraries will celebrate Public Domain Day 2025 with a symposium: “The Expanding Public Domain,” on January 22, 2025, from 1-5 p.m., in the Woodruff Seminar Room, Rose Library. This symposium will showcase opportunities afforded by the public domain for research and teaching. The Rose Library will also feature a display of public domain works from archival collections.
Thousands of works from 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 entered the public domain on January 1, 2025. Each can now be freely copied, distributed, and adapted, including the characters Popeye and Tintin; novels such as William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms“, and Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own;” and the musical compositions of “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
The symposium will feature speakers and professors Dan Sinykin, Valerie Babb, and Jo Guldi; English graduate students Maggie Dryden, Nia Judelson, and Angelica Johnson; and N’Kosi Oates, curator of African American Collections in the Rose Library. The display of works from the Rose Library’s collection will be curated by interim co-director Carrie Hintz.
When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable both access to and preservation of cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. The year 1929 was a long time ago and the vast majority of works from that year are not commercially available. You couldn’t buy them, or even find them, if you wanted. When they enter the public domain in 2025, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them (perhaps even creating a new genre of beloved-childhood-characters-turned-homicidal-maniacs).
Popeye in his first appearance, by E.C. Segar, East Liverpool Review, 1929-01-17, p. 12. Image in the public domain.
Works now in the public domain that are available at Emory Libraries (and findable at public libraries) include:
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
- Arthur Wesley Wheen, the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
- The Cocoanuts, directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley (the first Marx Brothers feature film)
- Hallelujah, directed by King Vidor (one of the first film from a major studio with an all African-American cast)
- Rhapsody in Blue, recorded by George Gershwin
- Shreveport Stomp, recorded by Jelly Roll Morton
Theatrical release poster for The Cocoanuts (1929). Image in the public domain.
Come celebrate the public domain with us at The Expanding Public Domain symposium! We encourage you to register (though it’s not required) to help us estimate attendance. You can find the registration link here: https://bit.ly/PublicDomainDaySymposium
This post was adapted by Emory Libraries’ open access librarian Jennifer Townes from Public Domain Day 2025 (licensed CC BY 4.0) by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, directors of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Duke University School of Law.