From Steamboat Willie to Animal Crackers: films that entered the US public domain in 2024, 2025 and 2026

Every January 1, a new group of works enters the public domain in the United States, and the U.S. Copyright Office has marked each of the last three with a “Lifecycle of Copyright” post on its blog. According to the Office, works published in 1928 entered the public domain on January 1, 2024, works from 1929 on January 1, 2025, and works from 1930 on January 1, 2026. Each post singles out a few films, seven in all by our count. This timeline sets them out, explains what the Office says the public domain allows, and gives the rule the Office states today.

The films the Office named

The posts present these films alongside books and songs, and none claims to be complete: each offers a selection of the year’s works. The 2025 post notes that its three films were some of the earliest of the Academy Awards era, though they were released too late to be considered for the first awards, given out in 1929. The posts also note that two of the seven are on the National Film Registry, Steamboat Willie since 1998 and Hallelujah since 2008, and the Office says the Library of Congress and The Film Foundation restored Hallelujah in 2021.

What the public domain allows

When copyright ends, the Office explains, the exclusive rights that came with it end too. Nobody then needs permission to copy the work, to perform or display it in public, or to build something new from it, for example by adapting or translating it. All three posts add the same caution: a work in the public domain “may still be subject to other protections.” In a note on that sentence, the 2024 and 2025 posts send readers to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to learn about patents, trademarks and trade secrets, and to the Office’s Circular 22, How to Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work, to research the status of a particular title.

The 2024 post uses Steamboat Willie to show where the line falls. Copyright never covered the names Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, or the general idea of mice that talk, the Office says; it covered the particular way the two characters were drawn in that film. With the film in the public domain, all of it is free of copyright, the Office says, from the animation of those early versions of the characters to the soundtrack. It also notes that this Mickey does not yet have the red shorts and white gloves he is known for today.

Books, plays and songs with film ties

Several of the non-film works in the posts have screen histories. Animal Crackers was adapted from a 1928 Broadway musical play by George S. Kaufman, Bert Kalmar, Morrie Ryskind and Harry Ruby; the play was registered as an unpublished work in 1929 and is now in the public domain as well, the 2026 post says. The same post lists Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon and recalls that it led to the 1941 film version. The 2025 post includes the 1929 song “Singin’ in the Rain,” which the Office says is probably most familiar from the 1952 film named after it. The 1941 and 1952 films are not among the works the posts list.

The rule that applies today

The Office’s Circular 15A, Duration of Copyright, revised in April 2026, explains why the dates fall where they do. For works already under federal copyright before January 1, 1978, protection can last at most 95 years: a first term of 28 years and a renewal term of 67. The renewal term was 28 years under the Copyright Act of 1909; the 1976 act raised it to 47 years, and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 added another 20. Every term now lasts until December 31 of the year in which it ends. On that basis, the circular concludes, “all works published in the United States before January 1, 1931, are in the public domain.”

The circular also shows why some later works can be in the public domain sooner, and why some foreign ones are not. Under the 1909 act a copyright that was not renewed ended after its first 28 years, and for works first copyrighted from 1950 through 1963, a missed renewal meant protection was lost for good at the end of the 28th year. In the other direction, the Uruguay Round Agreements Act restored copyright, as of January 1, 1996, in certain foreign works that had lost US protection, for example because they were never renewed.

By our own arithmetic from the circular’s 95-year rule, works published in 1931 with renewed copyrights reach the end of their term on December 31, 2026, which would make January 1, 2027, the next date on which a year of works joins the public domain. On November 11, 2026, the public domain section of the Office’s blog had no post on 1931 works; the latest yearly “Lifecycle” entry there was the 1930 post of December 31, 2025.

Copying a public domain film from a disc raises a separate question. Among the proposed exemptions to the federal ban on breaking digital locks that the Office published for comment on October 28, 2026, is one that would allow copying public domain films, for preservation, from DVDs and Blu-ray discs that also carry copyrighted material, and first-round comments are due December 7, 2026. Our report on that rulemaking has the details.