Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, at Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain:

On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. The literary highlights range from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage and the first four Nancy Drew novels.

I had no idea the Nancy Drew books I enjoyed in the 1970s and ’80s were first written in the 1930s. (The Hardy Boys books started in 1927!)

Other interesting public domain works: The Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (the book, not the fantastic movie), and Betty Boop.

Via Ellen Wexler at Smithsonian magazine, who summarizes and adds helpful context to a few of the books, movies, and music that entered the public domain this year, including Betty Boop’s first appearance in the 1930 short, Dizzy Dishes, which I’d never seen and is a mind-bending trip.