A new year means a whole new crop of work is entering the public domain. And that means endless opportunities for retellings, spoofs, adaptations, and fan fiction.
When Does a Work Enter the Public Domain?
In the U.S., a creative work enters the public domain based on a set of rules dictated by when it was originally created, who created it, and when it was published. That's a fancy way of saying "it's complicated."
For creative works (books, films, music scores) created on or after January 1, 1978, the general rule is that copyright lasts for the life of the author plus seventy years. Most works published in the U.S. before 1978 enter the public domain 95 years after their first authorized publication date, effectively on January 1st of the 96th year. (Of course, it's way more complicated than that, but that's a good overview of the general rule.)
Under current law, each January 1, another year’s worth of works enters the public domain. On January 1, 2026, works published in 1930 became free of copyright.
Additions to the Public Domain in 2026
Here are some of the works that the Freewrite team is most excited to see enter the public domain:
Books
- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
- Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (the full book version)
- Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage (the first novel featuring Miss Marple)
- Carolyn Keene (pseudonym for Mildred Benson), the first four Nancy Drew books, beginning with The Secret of the Old Clock
- Watty Piper (pen name of Arnold Munk), The Little Engine That Could (the popular illustrated version, with drawings by Lois Lenski)
- T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
- Edna Ferber, Cimarron
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (in the original German, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur)
- W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale
- Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
Characters & Comics
- Betty Boop from Fleischer Studios' Dizzy Dishes and other cartoons
- Rover (later renamed Pluto) from Disney's The Chain Gang (as an unnamed bloodhound) and The Picnic (as Rover)
- Blondie and Dagwood from the Blondie comic strips by Chic Young
- Nine new Mickey Mouse cartoons, the initial week of Mickey Mouse comic strips, and ten new Silly Symphonies cartoons from Disney
Movies
- All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Lewis Milestone (winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture)
- King f Jazz, directed by John Murray Anderson (musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman and Bing Crosby’s first feature-film appearance)
- Cimarron, directed by Wesley Ruggles (winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, registered for copyright in 1930)
- The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel), directed by Josef von Sternberg (starring Marlene Dietrich)
- Hell's Angels, directed by Howard Hughes (Jean Harlow’s film debut)
- The Big Trail, directed by Raoul Walsh (John Wayne’s first leading role)
- Murder!, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
- L'Âge d'Or, directed by Luis Buñuel, written by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí
- Free and Easy, directed by Edward Sedgwick (Buster Keaton’s first speaking role)
