Updated Jan. 6
“Die Dreigoschenoper” (“The Threepenny Opera”) by Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht entered the public domain on Jan. 1. The score, published in 1928, is now free to perform, record, adapt, manipulate, what you will, without paying royalties.
Instrumentally or in German, anyway. Singing its most famous tune, “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” in English, as “Mack the Knife,” will still cost you. The now-standard translation, by Marc Blitzstein, dates from 1954 and remains under copyright protection.
Two other familiar classical compositions from 1928, George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” and Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro,” weren’t published until the following year, and so will not enter the public domain until 2025.
If you’ve been waiting for a revival of sexual euphemism in song, 2024 could be a banner year. Newly royalty-free words and music include Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love),” “Makin’ Whoopee!” by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn, and several other suggestive numbers.
Copyright protection for recorded music lasts longer, so new arrivals in the public domain date from 1923. By then, the phonograph was becoming an affordable home-entertainment device and records were being produced in quantity. Quite a few recordings from 1923, notably James P. Johnson’s “Charleston,” several tunes played by the young Louis Armstrong with King Oliver’s jazz band, and various versions of “Yes, We Have No Bananas” by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn, are now free for all.
(Electrical recording – in which microphones amplify sound – arrived in 1925, and records began to “sound like music,” as a critic of the time put it. So the public domain will begin to sound better in a couple of years.)
Among books and plays whose texts are now in the public domain: D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando,” Evelyn Waugh’s “Decline and Fall,” Agatha Christie’s “The Mystery of the Blue Train,” “The Front Page” by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, A.A. Milne’s “House at Pooh Corner,” and Erich Maria Remarque’s “Im Westen nichts Neues” – “All Quiet on the Western Front” in the original German. Also, J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” which dates from 1911 but wasn’t copyrighted until 1928.
Latter-day adaptations – translations, musical arrangements and orchestrations, film and television scripts “based on” the originals – are still protected. So are post-1928 adaptations of tunes and texts, such as folk songs, fairy tales and Shakespeare plotlines, that have always been in the public domain.
The most widely noticed creation whose copyright has expired this year is the original Mickey Mouse, the stick-figurey, black-and-white character from Walt Disney’s 1928 animation “Steamboat Willie.” Later, more fleshed-out, in-color and fully clothed incarnations of the iconic rodent are still protected.
A roundup of works newly out from under copyright by Jennifer Jenkins of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain:
http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/
NOTE: All of the above are copyright expirations under US law. Copyright provisions differ in other countries. Like most legal matters involving money, intellectual-property law is complicated.
UPDATE: Another sampler of works whose copyrights have expired in the new year, from the UK’s Public Domain Review:
http://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2024/01/public-domain-day-2024/
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