‘I don’t disagree with the piece’ was the gist of my answer when asked about it on social media, but the piece does not really answer the point posed in the title*.
So let’s have a go at actually answering what a joined up railway network in Europe would need, and use the parts of the article to do so.
The subheading of the piece “Passenger numbers are rising, but competing with budget airlines will take work on ticket prices, infrastructure and integration” gives a clue as to where the solution lies, but that too is going to need some unpacking.
The need for more rail trips and by extension fewer short haul flights and fewer car journeys is obvious, but how to do it rather less so.
Is the picture when it comes to railway trips a glass half full or half empty? “In 2023, the last year with full data available, European trains were popular again, recovering from the pandemic’s effect, with a record 429bn passenger-kilometres (the number of rail passengers multiplied by the kilometres travelled)” Ramírez writes. But that represents only about 7% of passenger-km in the entire EU. Rail might be green, but is it relevant? Rail is doing well on its own terms, but not very well comparatively.
“Rail passenger numbers are expected to reach record highs in 2025 as routes keep expanding. The new year brings fresh connections between Paris and Berlin, Barcelona and Toulouse, Amsterdam and London and Budapest and Kyiv” Ramírez continues. But this is off. Paris-Berlin is one daily ICE each way a day, taking 8 hours. Barcelona-Toulouse will likewise be one train a day, if it launches later in 2025. Budapest-Kyiv is likewise once a day. Amsterdam-London with a handful of Eurostar services a day remains complex due to low terminal capacity in Amsterdam, and overall through trains through the Channel Tunnel transport fewer passengers today than they did in 2019.
The biggest cross border change of all is missing from this list: since mid-December there are two regular trains an hour, all day, between Belgium and Netherlands**. Up from one per hour. That’s 16 extra trains a day between Bruxelles and Rotterdam – a bigger increase than all the other routes stated. Compare that with Frankfurt (Main) – Paris that, despite a trip time of under 4 hours, has only 6 direct trains a day. The new Barcelona – Toulouse will likewise increase the number of trains on the high speed line between Figures and Perpignan to just 6 a day each way.
So we need to think beyond the shiny once a day services, and look at capacity on international routes as well.
What would rail reaching its potential look like on a route, rather than just the existence of the route.
And what would we need to get there?
More trains for a start.
For example neither SNCF nor Renfe has any more high speed TGV or AVE trains to run on France-Spain high speed services***, and there is no other rival (Flixtrain? Trenitalia?) that has any suitable trains at all. Germany-France ought to be a little easier in coming years, as some more cross border ICEs will be freed up from national services.
You cannot run more trains as you have no more trains to run.
So the crux is this: someone has to help finance the procurement of more trains for international operation. National governments are understandably reluctant to do this for international routes, so could the EU – via the European Investment Bank – better provide finance? Cross border problems need cross border solutions after all. Or could some sort of consortium or train manufacturer driven initiative help here?
Then to the next issue: “travelling by train throughout mainland Europe […] is a much more practical option than most people imagine. But finding out about it can be frustratingly difficult. Exceptions such as ÖBB Scotty, the Austrian railways app, show what is possible, but there’s still much work to be done.”
The passive tense is doing a lot of work there! Work to be done by whom?
“Competition has also driven down prices on some routes, particularly in Spain, Sweden, Austria and France.” France is a bit of a stretch. But the rest yes. And I would add Italy and Czechia. But if you want to make this happen you need to create the conditions for it – theoretically competition could fix a bunch of international routes, but only if rivals have trains to run, and can run them economically. And as Belgium-Netherlands shows, you can also do it via cooperations between state railways, or through public service obligation (PSO) contracts. But overall, yes, competition can in some places be part of the solution.
“Cross-border rail connections are still slower than they should be and collaboration between countries is fraught with disputes: for instance, the Spanish and French governments are blaming each other for delays on the Madrid-Paris lines.” Oh hell, this one looks like it has been over-edited. Yes, Renfe’s series 106 AVE trains have not been approved in France, but then again those same trains cannot run in Spain either just now due to a software fault, and reviews of these trains are terrible. But there are a bunch of places where some joined up political thinking would not go amiss, but again we are back to the domination of the national ego. At the very least the European Commission should compile an annual cross border rail index to give us a fair picture of where all of this is getting better and getting worse.
“The European commission is investing billions of euros in expanding high-speed rail connections, aiming to double their use by the end of this decade.” Yes, but most of that is going into lines – like the Figueres-Perpignan line much discussed here. But without matching this with attention to services running on those lines you make little progress.
“A new, better-integrated European rail traffic system is planned to phase out the current patchwork of national ones.” That’s ERTMS. But its implementation is slow, expensive and fraught with problems. We can’t wait for this to save us. And then the next sentence: “However, connections to local trains have often been neglected in favour of high-speed rail. That needs to be improved.” That has nothing to do with ERTMS, and a lot to do with railway companies and national and local governments – especially in France and in Spain – being totally incapable of coordinating timetables. This one is political, not technical.
“Governments must also continue to invest in basic infrastructure, with support from EU funds, to prevent systems from becoming obsolete. Track maintenance may not have the same glamour for politicians as inaugurating high-speed trains, but it’s the backbone of a reliable service” Yes, that’s correct, as is the diagnosis.
So, to draw all of this together, what do we need?
First, timetable and ticket data – this is the easiest one. You do not need to build anything new, at least not anything physical. The 2025 Regulation from the Commission on this needs to be clear, tough and passenger friendly – plan and book a ticket from A to B by train anywhere in Europe.
Second, a stock take of what we have. In my work on railway policy in the EU I am told over and over by Commission officials they are unaware of the situation on the ground, and where it is getting better or worse. An annual railway index EU-wide would help us establish that, help us all learn to improve.
Third, rolling stock. We do not literally have enough trains to up the services cross border at the places we need rail to increase its market share. Some sort of EU rolling stock plan, with a greater role for the EIB to finance it, makes sense here (although I readily admit I need to personally think more deeply how to do it).
Fourth, timetable coordination. All across Europe – in border regions in particular, but not only, poorly planned timetables limit rail’s potential. Powers for the EU Agency for Railways to coordinate paths at borders could possibly help here.
Fifth, coherent EU wide oversight of infrastructure investments – not least as a lot of infrastructure improvements can be financed through TEN-T. Political pressure from the EU level to force member states that are sluggish building or renovating their TEN-T corridors would be a start.
* – the title was likely not written by Ramírez herself but by a busy sub-editor, but this is not my central point here!
** – previously there was an hourly InterCity Bruxelles-Antwerpen-Rotterdam-Amsterdam, now there is an hourly EuroCity Direct Bruxelles-Antwerpen-Rotterdam-Amsterdam and an hourly EuroCity Bruxelles-Antwerpen-Rotterdam. There are also some compulsory reservation Eurostar trains on the route as well.
*** – SNCF sent 6 of its cross border TGVs to Spain to run them as OUIGO there, and stripped French signalling from them, and only has 6 left – so it cannot run more than 3x a day Paris-Barcelona. Renfe ordered series 106 trains to run cross border to France – but these trains have been plagued by problems, so older series 100 are used.
After nearly three years of Russia's war on Ukraine, trauma and grief run deep, especially in the suburbs of Kyiv, where Russian troops massacred civilians in the city of Bucha. A group of women who survived found a way to cope by training to shoot down Russian drones. And a warning before we start, this piece includes mentions of suicide and sexual assault, descriptions of wartime violence and the sounds of gunshots. NPR's Joanna Kakissis has the story.
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: In a cold forest outside Kyiv, the suburban moms in army green fatigues assemble their rifles. Valentina trained as a veterinarian. Inna is a math teacher. Tetiana used to be a water inspector. The group also includes a real estate agent, a nanny, a doctor and a pastry chef.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUNSHOT)
KAKISSIS: They shoot at targets in a muddy range. Valentina grins after she nails her shot.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUNSHOT)
VALENTINA: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: "We call ourselves the Combat Witches of Bucha," she says. "The name comes from a badge one of us had showing a witch with weapons."
VALENTINA: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: "The name doesn't matter that much," she says. "What matters more is belonging to this team, and that we are together."
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: The Witches are a female volunteer air defense unit trained to shoot down drones in the suburbs of Kyiv.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: NPR is not disclosing the women's last names at the request of the Ukrainian military. The women all come from the Kyiv suburbs where Russian forces killed and tortured residents early in the 2022 invasion. Valentina and her best friend, Inna, are from a village near the city of Bucha. At a cafe in the city, the two sit side by side. Valentina says they met 11 years ago when their youngest children became friends in kindergarten.
VALENTINA: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: She says, "our kids hung out. We talked, and soon, we realized we are cut from the same cloth." When Russian troops occupied the city at the end of February 2022, Valentina and her son crowded into a basement with neighbors.
INNA: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: Inna says her family drove to another village, holing up in a tiny old hut owned by her grandparents. It had firewood, a cellar and potatoes. In a cafe in another Kyiv suburb, Tetiana recalls her experience during the occupation - how hurriedly she packed a suitcase for herself and her two daughters, how her husband, who had joined the military, rushed to embrace her and their girls one last time.
TETIANA: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: She says, "my husband told me, my task is to save our city. Yours is to save our children." A friend took Tetiana and the girls to Spain. Walking along the seaside, Tetiana felt a cold emptiness in her heart.
TETIANA: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: "My husband had not called when he was supposed to," she says. "And then, at 3:30 that morning, someone called me and told me he was dead." She asks me to shut off the recorder as her eyes fill with tears. "I'm a soldier," she says, "and soldiers aren't supposed to cry."
The occupation lasted a week. Valentina huddled in the basement. She heard women considering unimaginable choices like killing themselves and their own children to avoid being raped and tortured by Russian troops. Valentina sent a message to Inna.
INNA: (Non-English language spoken) Ina.
KAKISSIS: "She told me, if anything happens to me, please take care of my son." Valentina and her family survived the siege. When she and Inna reunited, they burst into tears. Tetiana returned to Ukraine and volunteered to transport supplies to the front line in honor of her husband, but her emotions were raw.
TETIANA: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: "I was going through a very tough time, and honestly, I don't want to talk about it now because I will cry," she says, "and you won't be able to calm me down." Meanwhile, over the last year, Russian drone attacks on Ukraine have increased. While scrolling on her phone last summer, Tetiana saw an announcement about a volunteer unit called the Witches of Bucha that shoots down these drones.
TETIANA: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: "And I immediately dialed the number," she says. "I got an interview and then the job." Valentina and Inna saw it, too, and signed up together.
VALENTINA: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: "We were just sitting and crying at home, and that's no good," Valentina says. "And now we've got skills. We know how to hold a gun, how to shoot a gun. Maybe we don't know how to kill the enemy, but that's coming up next."
VALENTINA: (Laughter).
KAKISSIS: The Witches of Bucha are all close friends now. They call or text each other every day. They meet for coffee, go on vacation together.
VALENTINA: It's going to be explosions.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION)
KAKISSIS: And every week, they're back in the forest outside Kyiv, practicing their drills and patrolling for drones at night. A training drone flies overhead, over trenches and burnt vehicles, remnants of the Russian occupation.
(SOUNDBITE OF ENGINE RUNNING)
KAKISSIS: The women jump into a truck outfitted with a recoil-operated machine gun called the Maxim, the first fully automatic machine gun in the world. A male soldier helps them practice putting it together. Tetiana says they have not yet shot down any Russian drones.
TETIANA: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: "We haven't had the chance yet," she says. "They don't fly over here. We can see them, but they're not in our sector." Taking down drones, she says, is not the only goal for the Witches of Bucha. More importantly, she says, they are taking care of each other, no longer victims but soldiers.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Spafford (Photo courtesy of Western Tidewater Regional Jail)
A federal judge set a $25,000 bond for an Isle of Wight County man facing a federal weapons charge in connection with a Dec. 18 FBI raid at his Foursquare Road home that the case prosecutor called the largest seizure of homemade explosives in FBI history.
Judge Lawrence Leonard agreed on Dec. 30 to release 36-year-old Brad Kenneth Spafford, who had been held at the Western Tidewater Regional Jail in Suffolk since his Dec. 17 arrest, into the custody of his mother, conditioned on his wearing an electronic monitoring device and surrendering his passport. He will be restricted to his mother’s house when not traveling to and from work, medical services, meetings with his attorneys or religious services. The judge agreed to stay his order pending the government’s appeal.
According to a criminal complaint and supporting documents, Spafford is charged with possessing a short barrel rifle, which federal law defines as less than 16 inches long and illegal unless registered with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
During the nearly two-hour bond hearing in Norfolk, a federal prosecutor painted Spafford as an anti-government extremist who, according to an affidavit accompanying the criminal complaint against him, was stockpiling weapons and homemade ammunition, including the short barrel rifle, for “something that Spafford would not be able to do alone.”
Detective Rachelanne Cardwell, a Suffolk police officer and member of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, testified that agents who searched Spafford’s home found over 150 homemade explosive devices. Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Gant called it the largest seizure of homemade explosives in FBI history.
Some were non-lethal training devices but many were live explosives.
Spafford allegedly told a confidential informant, whom Cardwell testified Spafford had known to be a local police officer and neighbor, that he owns an unregistered 10-inch barrel rifle and makes approximately 50 rounds of ammunition per day. Spafford allegedly told the informant he’d moved many hundred-pound boxes of ammunition to the Foursquare Road residence “but he does not have 10,000 rounds yet,” according to the affidavit.
Cardwell testified that Spafford, in conversations with the informant, allegedly expressed a desire to “bring back political assassination” and had been using a photograph of President Joe Biden for target practice at a shooting range where he was pursuing a 300- to 400-yard sniper qualification. Following the July assassination attempt on President-elect Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Spafford allegedly remarked to the informant, “Bro, I hope they don’t miss (Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala (Harris),” Cardwell said.
Cardwell testified that FBI agents found multiple canisters in a freezer in Spafford’s garage containing HMTD, which she described as a type of homemade explosive using common household chemicals. They also allegedly found powders, metals and components of PVC pipe bombs, including an explosive powder Cardwell referred to as ETN.
The affidavit further alleges Spafford to have lost several fingers to a homemade explosive device on July 4, 2021, though Spafford presently isn’t charged with bomb-making.
When Larry Woodward, the attorney representing Spafford, questioned Cardwell, she acknowledged she had no knowledge of Spafford’s having made any specific threats against any person or organization. She did, however, mention a journal FBI agents had found in Spafford’s residence containing recipes and inventory, including a recipe for homemade C-4, a military-grade explosive that requires a license for civilian use.
Woodward, during his questioning of Cardwell, established that the informant did not personally witness Spafford building or detonating any explosive devices, and painted his client as merely disliking the Internal Revenue Service and believing in federal government overreach.
Leonard cited among his reasons for granting Spafford bond that the only offense charged to date was his alleged possession of the short barrel rifle, and that Gant hadn’t argued the suspect poses a flight risk.
Spafford faces up to 10 years on the short barrel rifle charge. Gant said there were “numerous potential additional charges” that could be filed, each of which could carry an additional 10-year sentence if Spafford is convicted.
Per the terms of his release, Spafford is to not possess any firearms or destructive devices.
Sue Devito, who lives within a half-mile of Spafford’s Foursquare Road residence, told The Smithfield Times she heard “five or six different explosions” between noon and 5:30 p.m., on Dec. 18.
“We knew probably around noon we heard a bang, but it could have been any number of things. … I’m wondering (if) it was just ammunition that they were blowing up,” Devito said.
She received a call from her son around 4:30 p.m. informing her that neighborhood watch groups on Facebook were reporting an incident at Spafford’s house, and she drove to the site to see what was going on.
There she saw what she described as a bomb truck, a Smithfield Volunteer Fire Department vehicle and multiple police cars.
Cardwell testified that the bomb squad had safely detonated most of the explosives, save for nine kept for evidence.
Spafford graduated from Isle of Wight Academy in 2006. He’d formed a limited liability company, Wandering Woods Ranch LLC, at his home address on Dec. 11, a week before his arrest, according to state corporation commission records.
Editor’s note:This story was updated at 4:36 p.m. on Dec. 30.
European green crabs are small, measuring just four inches across. But since they were first introduced in the 1980s, these spiny crustaceans have become a massive problem, wreaking havoc on coastal ecosystems along the western coast of North America. They destroy eelgrass habitats, feast on juvenile salmon and king crab, and outcompete native crabs. In doing so, these invasive critters also pose a threat to the crabbing and fishing industries, which many coastal communities rely on for income.
Now, biologists have identified a new, furry ally in the fight against European green crabs: sea otters.
The findings highlight the importance of protecting native apex predators, which may help restore the balance of disrupted ecosystems.
“That is really a win-win if you can help protect those native species,” says study co-author Rikke Jeppesen, an ecologist at the reserve, to the Washington Post’s Kyle Melnick. “It may benefit your ecosystem in multiple ways, including protecting against invaders. No one loses out in that case.”
Scientists believe European green crabs (Carcinus maenas), also known as Joe rocker crabs, first arrived in North America in the early 1800s. They likely caught a ride in the ballast of merchant ships sailing from Europe to the East Coast, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The crustaceans made their way to the West Coast in the 1980s—potentially also in ballast—and have since been spotted in California, Washington, Oregon, Canada and southern Alaska.
European green crabs are not only detrimental to coastal ecosystems, but they’re also extremely difficult to eradicate. States have spent millions of dollars trying to combat the invaders, without much success.
Southern sea otters, meanwhile, were nearly hunted to extinction for their soft, warm fur during the 18th and 19th centuries. Their population plummeted from between 150,000 and 300,000 individuals to a few thousand total individuals by the early 1900s, with just 50 off the coast of central California. But thanks to an international hunting ban in 1911 and the introduction of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972, these charismatic creatures have been making a comeback. Today, an estimated 3,000 southern sea otters live along California’s central coast.
At the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, located roughly 20 miles north of Monterey, the first male southern sea otter showed up in the late 1990s. And, starting in the early 2000s, females began arriving. The Monterey Bay Aquarium also released 37 sea otter pups at the reserve, reports USA Today’s Elizabeth Weise. Some 120 individuals now inhabit the tidal estuary—a partially enclosed transitional area featuring both saltwater and freshwater—on California’s Monterey Bay.
Southern sea otters typically eat clams, mussels and sea urchins—and, since they lack blubber, they have to eat a lot to stay warm. But within the reserve, they’ve been happily foregoing these foods and munching on the abundant European green crabs instead. In 2014, for instance, one researcher was astonished to watch a single sea otter devour roughly 30 European green crabs in an hour, per the Washington Post.
“The otters are a just super voracious predator,” says study co-author Kerstin Wasson, an ecologist at the reserve and the University of California, Santa Cruz, to USA Today. “We calculated that the current otter population here eats somewhere between 50,000 and 120,000 green crabs a year.”
In the early 2000s, researchers caught as many as 100 European green crabs in one trap. Today, when they place traps in the same areas, they typically catch fewer than ten of the invaders. They’ve stopped catching large European green crabs altogether.
“I’ve studied green crabs in estuaries on three coasts and two continents for decades, and this is one of the first pieces of good news we’ve gotten,” says Jeppesen in a statement.
While conducting their research, they also noticed another trend. Some areas of the estuary are diked to allow for farming, which means water no longer flows in or out with the tides. These areas tend to have fewer southern sea otters and more European green crabs.
This discovery adds to the growing body of evidence that removing dikes—and re-introducing tidal waters—can be beneficial for estuary ecosystems.
“Now we know these benefits include decreasing the abundance of invasive species by restoring natural food webs, with our coastal apex predator, the sea otter, on top,” says Wasson in the statement.
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Among Meta’s many resolutions for the new year — making augmented reality and the metaverse happen, positioning itself to absorb TikTok refugees if the app gets banned, cracking open Apple’s platforms to get more access to user data, and attriting its competition in artificial intelligence with breathtaking spending — one stands out as plain weird: filling its social-media platforms with bots. According to the Financial Times:
The Silicon Valley group is rolling out a range of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook, as it battles with rival tech groups to attract and retain a younger audience. “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that’s where we see all of this going,” he added.
The company has been talking about this for a while, to somewhat bewildered responses from the general public. The simplest explanation for what it’s doing is that the company has invested a lot in building generative AI models and would like to get a return on its investment through its most lucrative products: If there’s any economically productive way for Meta to plug AI tools into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, it’ll consider it. But Meta, a company with no qualms about chasing, copying, and acquiring its way into trends, is also reacting here. It bought SocialAI, a Twitter-ish “social network” where users’ “feeds” and “comment sections” are filled entirely with bots playing different characters. At the same time, it’s surely noticed that its platforms are already filling with AI slop anyway and that some of this slop was creating a lot of engagement, meaning that, in the ways that matter most to Meta, it’s not really slop at all. The company also clearly noticed the rise of Character.ai, the popular — but possibly doomed — lawsuit magnet of an app in which young users create and chat and act out fictional scenarios with AI characters.
Still, Meta’s framing here is unique to the company. It’s by far the leading American social-network firm, with more than a billion actual people using its products around the world to interact with one another. Practically everyone in tech is trying practically everything with AI, but Meta, the suggestion goes, is in a singular position to populate shared human spaces with synthetic characters, and it seems to think it’ll work.
As galling as this might sound to a casual Facebook user — after years of characterizing fake and automated profiles as spam, it’s okay now if Meta is running the accounts and they’re a little more convincing? — it has the benefit of sounding somewhat new and novel. Maybe these personas really will be engaging enough to post and respond alongside your friends, family, co-workers, and celebrities in your existing social-media feeds; maybe social-media feeds are the right place to encounter highly specific chatbots; maybe these chatbots can be entertaining or even helpful in the context of the apps users already check multiple times per day. It might not be a convincing story, but it’s a story: There are increasingly intelligent bots among us, and they’re joining social media.
The main benefit of this story is that, like a lot of AI products — it’s right there in the name! — it anthropomorphizes the underlying technology. A less compelling but perhaps more honest and useful way to characterize Meta’s impulse here is as the next step in a long process of automation and social mediation. When Facebook and Instagram were new, the content you encountered wasn’t just created by people you knew or chose to follow — it carried with it legible and obvious evidence of provenance. If you saw something from someone you didn’t follow or intend to interact with, it was because someone you know chose to share it; if you posted something, you could mostly assume it would be seen by people who intended to see it, and maybe by more people they intended to show it to. Well before the rise of TikTok, which mostly replaced follow/follower relationships with opaque algorithmic distribution, but especially after it, Facebook and Instagram have leaned hard into subtler forms of automation: content recommendations; people recommendations; unexplained stuff appearing in feeds, as Reels, or bugging users in notifications. The result is platforms where users are consuming more content but in some cases producing less, spaces that function less like social networks than like targeted advertising systems for everything.
A lot of formerly social aspects of a platform like Facebook, in other words, have already been automated and replaced with machine learning, but each step in this direction has been subtle and somewhat concealed: You don’t really know, and certainly aren’t clearly told, why Meta assumes this or that Instagram Reel is something you want to see, or why one thing appears above another in an algorithmically sorted feed.
The idea of introducing AI characters into Meta’s platforms is in some ways distinct and new — we’re talking about not just automating content curation and promotion here but, in some cases, actual creation — but can also be understood as a way to rebrand an effective but alienating overhaul that’s been a decade in the making. With many AI products — from ChatGPT to a customer-support bot — the performance of personhood, which is a bit of a misleading magic trick even when done carefully, is at least as important as raw capabilities. Meta can claim it’s building technology to create social-media agents that can exist on its platforms “in the same way that accounts do,” and maybe it’ll turn out to be right. But Meta’s AI characters are also a way to slap a more friendly, humanlike face on a long, bloodless campaign of social automation.
Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different.[1]
On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon.[2] 2025 marks a milestone: all of the books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’ in the Rain. Below is just a handful of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2025.[3] To find more material from 1929, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.
The title of Faulkner’s novel was itself taken from a public domain work, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and its lament over the seeming meaningless of life. “Life…is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” The Sound and the Fury was published on October 7, 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression. Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. During those intervening twenty years the world had witnessed unspeakable horrors: economic crises had fueled the rise of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Then came World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the beginnings of the Cold War. In August of 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic weapon. A book written in the shadow of economic disaster was being celebrated after worldwide catastrophe and in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Despite all of that, Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel acceptance speech sounded a note of defiant optimism, and an uncompromising defense of role of art in helping us understand ourselves and our time:
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things…The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
“Not merely the record of man, but one of the pillars that helps him prevail.” Words written by the author of a timeless work that took from the public domain and now gives back to it. In an historical moment when many are inclined to despair, to believe that the problems and divisions of our society are too intractable, too complex for hope, Faulkner speaks to us of “the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” But Faulkner’s work was neither ephemeral nor doomed. To use his words again, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Why care about the public domain? That is why.
This is just a small selection from the thousands of books and plays entering the public domain in 2025. There are literary masterpieces, detective stories, and a “sidesplitting spoof of men, women, and psychologists.” Among the works from 1929 are two acclaimed books about World War I – A Farewell to Arms and the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front – written by authors who served in the war and witnessed its traumas of firsthand. From Virginia Woolf comes a feminist classic about how a woman needed “a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” something that her imagined character Judith Shakespeare lacked, depriving her of the opportunity – despite her talents – to become another Shakespeare.
Last year we celebrated the long-awaited arrival of Mickey and Minnie Mouse into the public domain. In 2025 we welcome a dozen new Mickey Mouse films from 1929. Mickey speaks his first words – “Hot dogs! Hot dogs!” – and debuts his familiar white gloves. That version of Mickey is now officially in the public domain. The same year Disney released the first five cartoons in its Silly Symphonies series, beginning with “The Skeleton Dance.” The films from 1929 are important not just for their content but also for understanding developments in the art form itself. The year marked a turning point in film, with sound films rapidly replacing silent cinema. Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Harold Lloyd, and Clara Bow all released their first sound films, while Buster Keaton starred in his final silent feature. Our list includes movie versions of musicals and revues that capitalized on the enthusiasm for synchronized sound and yielded some of the compositions featured below. (Please note that later versions of the films above that added new material or sound might still be copyrighted.)
E. C. Segar, Popeye (in “Gobs of Work” from the Thimble Theatre comic strip)
Hergé (Georges Remi), Tintin (in “Les Aventures de Tintin” from the magazine Le Petit Vingtième)
In past years we have celebrated an exciting cast of public domain characters: the original Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh, and the final iterations of Sherlock Holmes from Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. In 2025 copyright expires over more aspects of Mickey from his 1929 incarnations, along with the initial versions of Popeye and Tintin. As with Pooh and Mickey, it is the original versions of Popeye and Tintin that are public domain. While Popeye 1.0 had superhuman capabilities, he did not derive them from eating spinach until 1931. However, it appears that the copyright in this 1931 comic strip was not renewed—if this is true, Popeye’s spinach-fueled strength is already in the public domain. You can read more details about this below in our explanation of how copyright law applies to characters. (Fun facts: Olive Oyl actually dates from 1919 and has long been in the public domain. Before Popeye, her boyfriend was named Ham Gravy.)
The character Buck Rogers first appeared in 1929 and is public domain in 2025, but technically the futuristic space hero has already been copyright-free for decades, despite claims that he was still copyrighted. This is because the copyright registration for the Buck Rogers comic strip was also not renewed, so that its copyright expired after 28 years. The original version of the character was actually introduced in a novella as “Anthony Rogers” in 1928; that character has long been public domain as well.
(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue, lyrics by Andy Paul Razaf, music by Thomas W. “Fats” Waller & Harry Brooks (a song about racial injustice from the musical Hot Chocolates)
This year’s music includes songs by the great Fats Waller, music from movies and musicals, famous classical compositions, jazz standards, and popular music.[5] Only the musical compositions—the music and lyrics that you might see on a piece of sheet music—are entering the public domain, not the recordings of those songs, which are covered by a separate copyright with a different term of protection. The lyrics and music to Tiptoe Through the Tulips were published in 1929 and will be free for anyone to copy, perform, record, adapt, or interpolate into their own song.[6] But the 1968 recording by Tiny Tim is still copyrighted. Note, however, that sound recording rights are more limited than composition rights—you can legally imitate a sound recording (should you be able to channel Tiny Tim’s signature falsetto) even if your imitation sounds exactly the same, you just cannot copy from the actual recording.
Under a law called the Music Modernization Act, recordings from 1924 will be open for legal reuse, after the conclusion of a 100-year term. There are some incredible performances: George Gershwin performing Rhapsody in Blue, Jelly Roll Morton playing Shreveport Stomp, and an early recording from contralto and civil rights icon Marian Anderson, who is famous for her 1939 performance to an integrated audience of over 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. (Corrections: an earlier version of this article listed sound recordings of “Nobody Know de Trouble I’ve Seen” from Marian Anderson and “Everybody Loves My Baby” from Clarence Williams' Blue Five with Louis Armstrong because both recordings were made in 1924. However, subsequent research indicates that these recordings were not released until 1925, making them public domain in 2026. We have therefore replaced those entries with recordings by Marian Anderson and Louis Armstrong that were published in 1924.)
As you look through the list above, note that only the 1924 recordings made by these artists are entering the public domain, not their later recordings. Note also that songs first published as part of a movie are treated differently from separate sound recordings because copyright law’s definition of “sound recording” specifically excludes “sounds accompanying a motion picture.” So the 1929 recording of Singin’ in the Rain from the film The Hollywood Revue of 1929 has the same copyright term as the movie and is public domain in 2025, while regular sound recordings from 1929 have the 100-year term and their copyrights won’t expire until 2030. To listen to old recordings, go to the Library of Congress National Jukebox—in 2025 the Library of Congress will make all of the 1924 recordings in its collection available for download, while recordings from 1925 forward will be streaming-only until they are in the public domain.
Art
Copyright will also expire in 2025 over works of art that were published or registered in 1929, including drawings, paintings, and photography. 1929 was when Salvador Dalí moved to Paris and became a key part of the Surrealist art movement, and his Illumined Pleasures, The Accommodations of Desire, and The Great Masturbator will be public domain. While we were able to locate information indicating that those works were published in La Révolution surréaliste or as part of the Dalí exhibition at Goemans, we have not yet found definitive historical information for other artworks, notably René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images.
Magritte’s painting is actually a useful illustration of the intense difficulties in determining the copyright status of many works from long ago. It is only public domain in 2025 if it was “published,” as defined by copyright law, in 1929. If its first publication was not until later, for example at the Palais des Beaux-Arts exhibition in 1933, then the copyright lasts for 95 years after that year. (For never-published, never-registered works, the term is life + 70 years.) Publication dates can be more challenging to determine for art than it is for books, songs, or films, which were published when they were officially put on sale or released. Generally the law looks at whether the art was genuinely released to the public. If it was created but remained only in the artist’s studio, this did not count. But the rules are murky and “published” is a term of art in copyright law that was not well-defined. Early court cases suggest that artworks were considered published if they were exhibited without restrictions (sometimes there were measures preventing people from copying works on display), circulated in a magazine, catalogue, or other media with authorization, or offered for sale to the public.
Did any of these things occur in 1929 with The Treachery of Images? We are trying to find out. With the help of art historians and librarians, we have combed through catalogues and magazines from the era and biographies of Magritte. We discovered that another version of the image with the pipe reversed appeared in Variétés magazine—that image is public domain in 2025. But out of an abundance of caution we are still looking into the historical records for information about the famous painting before heralding its official entry into the public domain.
Keep reading to learn more about the public domain! You can use the links below to jump to the answers.
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. 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.
The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. You could think of it as the yin to copyright’s yang. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But the United States Constitution requires that those rights last only for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! It is part of copyright’s ecosystem. The point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so.
How does the public domain feed creativity? Here are just two examples from 2024. You may have enjoyed the film Wicked in 2024. Like many of its predecessors, it is based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books, and it offers origin stories for the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good. From the literary realm, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huckleberry’s friend who is an escaped slave. The novel won the 2024 National Book Award and Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. As summed up by a New York Times review: “‘Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.” Mark Twain famously wanted copyright to last forever—if he had his wish, would his heirs have sued Everett? Thankfully, we did not have to find out, and Everett could publish James without such litigation.
James continues a tradition of retelling iconic works from new character perspectives. When author Alice Randall sought to revisit Gone With the Wind from the slaves’ perspective in The Wind Done Gone (2001), she was sued for copyright infringement. Gone With the Wind is copyrighted until 2032, and Randall only won the right to publish her work after a stressful and expensive lawsuit. (Full disclosure: I know it was stressful because I was one of her lawyers. Remarkably, the book was initially banned by a district court decision before the ban was lifted by the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.)
The works we are celebrating from 1929 also illustrate how the public domain nurtures creativity. Once again, one of the best exemplars is Disney itself, whose beloved works have consistently built upon the public domain. The Mickey cartoons from 1929 are no exception. One of the things that made them so popular was their ingenious reuse of music. At the time, synchronizing moving images with sound was still new, and Walt Disney (correctly) predicted that sound films were the future. Steamboat Willie pioneered a technique that would even become known as “mickey mousing”—synchronizing music with what was occurring on screen. Here is only a partial list of public domain music that could be freely used in the 1929 cartoons. All of these compositions date from before 1880, when the maximum copyright term was 42 years: Blue Danube, Pop Goes the Weasel, Yankee Doodle, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, Ach Du Lieber Augustin, Listen to the Mocking Bird, A-Hunting We Will Go, Dixie, The Girl I Left Behind Me, a tune known as the snake charmer song, Coming Thru the Rye, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Auld Lang Syne, Aloha ‘Oe, Turkey in the Straw, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, Habanera and Toreador Song from Carmen, Lizst’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Goodnight, Ladies.
This is the promise of the public domain. Who knows what this year’s newly public domain works might inspire? Yes, inevitably there will be slasher films, trying to trade on the shock of putting a familiar character in an unfamiliar genre. They may even generate a lot of buzz—their creators certainly hope so. But the ability freely to revisit public domain works spurs a much wider range of creativity, likely to have more lasting impact. Think of all the films, cartoons, books, plays, musicals, video games, songs, and other works based on Greek mythology, the works of Shakespeare, Jane Austen’s novels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. What remakes stand the test of time? With Shakespeare, some of the works that come to mind range from The Lion King to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (from Hamlet), and from West Side Story (from Romeo and Juliet) to 10 Things I Hate About You and Kiss Me Kate (from The Taming of the Shrew). From the serious to the whimsical, these are public domain reuses with more enduring appeal. Far from dimming the luster of the original works, they have allowed their legacy to live on.
How do copyright and trademark law apply to characters?
When Mickey Mouse 1.0 went into the public domain last year, he joined a host of other public domain characters—Winnie-the-Pooh, Sherlock Holmes, Snow White, Cinderella, Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, Robin Hood, Santa Claus, and the Wonderful Wizard of Oz characters, to name a few. This year, we get new iterations of Mickey and Minnie, and the first versions of Popeye and Tintin (plus the dog Snowy). Looking ahead, an exciting new cast of characters will become public domain in the coming years: Betty Boop and Pluto (originally named Rover) in 2026, Goofy in 2028 (originally named Dippy Dawg), Mary Poppins and Donald Duck in 2030, Superman in 2034, Batman in 2035, Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny in 2036, and Wonder Woman in 2037.
When the copyright expires over a creative work, the characters within that work enter the public domain, and you can use them in new works without permission or fee. What if those characters also appear in more recent works that remain copyrighted? You can still use the public domain version of the character, as well as uncopyrightable elements from later iterations. But you cannot use new, still-copyrighted versions of the character until those rights expire (unless your use qualifies as "fair use"). Here are the basic rules.
First, under US copyright law, anyone is free to use characters as they appeared in public domain works. If those characters recur in later works that are still under copyright, the rights only extend to the newly added material in those works, not the underlying material from the public domain works—that content remains freely available.
Second, with newer versions of characters, copyright only extends to their features that qualify for protection. It is not enough for the new material to be different. The features must be “original, creative expression,” meaning that they were independently created (as opposed to copied from somewhere else) and possess at least a modicum of creativity. Mere “ideas” such as generic character traits are not copyrightable. Nor are “merely trivial” or “miniscule” variations added to the original characters. In addition, using commonplace elements that have become standard or indispensable (copyright law calls these “scènes à faire”) is not infringement.[7]
How do the legal rules apply to Popeye? All of Popeye’s features from the 1929 are public domain in 2025. His personality was apparent from his very first appearance. He is standing on a deck in a full sailor suit, pipe in mouth, anchor tattoo on enormous forearm. Castor Oyl, Olive Oyl’s brother, asks Popeye: “Are you a sailor?” Popeye’s rejoinder: “’Ja think I’m a cowboy?” In the later comic strips from 1929, Popeye is gruff and tough, but also has a soft side. Two days before Black Thursday, the first day of the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression, Popeye implores Castor Oyl not to kick a poor farmer off of his land. The next day, in a strip called “A Soft-Hearted Landlord,” Oyl complies and Popeye comforts the farmer.
From Popeye, on the eve of the Great Depression, we find one of Faulkner’s “old universal truths” – one of the pillars that help humanity “endure and prevail” – compassion.
As mentioned earlier, Popeye does not attribute his strength to eating spinach until 1931. Initially, we thought that the copyright in this 1931 comic strip was still valid, meaning that this character feature might remain copyrighted. But when digging deeper into the copyright records, we made a discovery: it appears that the copyright in the 1931 comic was not renewed. If this is true, Popeye’s spinach power has actually been in the public domain for decades. (Under the copyright law at the time, copyrights lapsed after 28 years if they were not renewed. We poured through both the Catalog of Copyright Entries and Virtual Card Catalog for every entry containing possible keywords – Popeye, the Thimble Theatre/Theater comic strip in which he appeared, his author E. C. Segar, or King Features Syndicate, the copyright owner – and found no renewal for the 1931 strip. Because these terms were used in other registrations and renewals for the Popeye comics, it is unlikely that there was a renewal omitting all of them.) Here is the first reference to spinach that we found, from June 1931.
Under copyright law, the only aspects of this strip that became public domain upon non-renewal were its new features, such as the dialogue about spinach, not material it derived from works that remained in-copyright, such as the original Popeye character from 1929. In 2025, if our research is correct, the underlying Popeye character joins his spinach power in the public domain, making the composite available for reuse.
Not all characters will be copyrightable independently of the stories in which they appear. In a famous case from 1930, a judge explained why two lovers from a play were uncopyrightable: “The lovers are so faintly indicated as to be no more than stage properties. They are loving and fertile; that is really all that can be said of them, and anyone else is quite within his rights if he puts loving and fertile lovers in a play of his own, wherever he gets the cue.” Another famous case actually involved a work that is featured in this year’s celebration, The Maltese Falcon. You might reasonably assume that the hard-boiled, tough-guy detective Sam Spade just become copyright-free in 2025. Intriguingly, no. In 1954, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that he was never copyrightable to begin with. It explained that a character was only copyrightable if it “really constitutes the story being told, but if the character is only the chessman in the game of telling the story he is not within the area of the protection afforded by the copyright.” If characters were merely “vehicles for the story told,” they were not themselves copyrightable.[8]
Later cases have retreated from this stringent standard, however. Mickey Mouse, the characters from Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky movies, and even the Batmobile (even though it was a car that “lacks sentient attributes and does not speak”) were all held to be copyrightable characters. On the other hand, “The Moodsters” – five color-coded characters that represented human emotions – were deemed uncopyrightable. The creator of The Moodsters had claimed that Disney infringed her copyright in these characters with its first Inside Out movie. Among other things, the court explained that “using a color to represent a mood or emotion” was an uncopyrightable idea, and found that The Moodsters lacked “consistent, identifiable character traits and attributes.”
What if the character is no longer copyrighted, but its name or image is still subject to trademark rights? Copyrights and trademarks are different. Copyrights cover creative works and prevent people from copying and adapting them without permission, with the goal of providing economic incentives to create and distribute cultural material. Trademarks cover words, logos, images, and other signifiers that serve as brands identifying the source of a product. Nike can prevent other producers of athletic apparel from putting “Nike” or a swoosh on their merchandise so that when purchasers see those indicators, they know they are getting a Nike product.
Trademark law is all about preventing consumer confusion, and not about getting in the way of creativity. You can use a character's name or image in a new creative work so long as consumers are not likely to be misled into thinking that your work is produced or sponsored by the trademark holder. One way to help ensure that consumers are not confused is to make the actual source of the work – you or your company – clear on the title screen or cover, along with a prominent disclaimer indicating that your work was not produced, endorsed, licensed, or approved by the trademark owner.
Hearst Holdings owns the trademark rights to the word “Popeye” for products such as cartoon strips, "costumed figures" for musical plays and theatrical shows, amusement parks, advertising services, and clothing. These trademark rights are limited, and do not extend to unrelated products. “Popeyes” chicken and biscuits can coexist with Hearst's “Popeye” the sailor products, just as Dove soap and Dove chocolate, or Delta faucets and Delta airlines, can use the same brand name even though they are different companies.
Now that Popeye 1.0 is in the public domain, can you use “Popeye” in a new work featuring the public domain character? The answer should be yes, so long as people do not think Hearst is producing or sponsoring your work. In fact, trademark law has a number of speech-protecting limitations that safeguard such artistic uses. One defense allows “nominative use” of a trademark as a point of reference – for example, using “Popeye” accurately to refer to the character in your work. Another comes from a case called Rogers v. Grimaldi, which privileged the use of trademarks in titles of expressive works when the term has some artistic relevance to the new work and does not explicitly mislead as to the source of the work. While a disclaimer is not required to benefit from these limitations, it can nevertheless be useful to make abundantly clear that you are not providing an official Hearst production.
Hearst has recently sought to extend its rights beyond the “Popeye” name, and filed two applications for federal trademark registrations of graphical depictions of Popeye. One application seeks to trademark the image to the right for various “entertainment services” including films and television series, and the other deals with NFTs. The trademark office has not granted the applications because, at least as of November 2024, Hearst has not begun using the Popeye images as brand identifiers for the relevant products. Until it does so, it cannot own trademark rights in those images.
Even if Hearst does begin using the images in commerce and successfully obtains trademark rights, you can still legally put the 1929 Popeye character in a new creative work in a way that does not mislead purchasers into thinking they are getting a Hearst-branded product. In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court said that trademarks cannot be used to make an end run around copyright law because this would “create a species of mutant copyright law that limits the public’s federal right to copy and to use expired copyrights.” In other words, trademark rights cannot be used to block the freedoms that the expiration of copyright allows, such as using a public domain character in a book or movie. As with the “Popeye” name, one way to help dispel potential confusion is to make it clear that you are responsible for the new work, and to add a disclaimer indicating that your work is not produced or sponsored by Hearst.
You can read a fuller analysis here about how all of these rules applied to Mickey Mouse when he entered the public domain.
For copyrighted culture, the public domain arrives only after a long wait. Works from 1929 were first set to go into the public domain after a 56-year term in 1985, but a term extension pushed that date to 2005. They were then supposed to go into the public domain in 2005, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit another 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years. Now the wait is over.
Many of the works featured above are famous; that is why we included them. Their copyright holders benefitted from 20 more years of copyright because the works were still earning royalties. But they are just the tip of the iceberg. When Congress extended the copyright term for these works, it also did so for all of the works whose commercial viability had long lapsed. For the vast majority—probably 99%—of works from 1929, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason. A Congressional Research Service report indicated that only around 2% of copyrights between 55 and 75 years old retain commercial value. After 75 years, that percentage is even lower. Most older works are “orphan works,” where the copyright owner cannot be found at all.
This is why a former head of our Copyright Office concluded that adding an extra 20 years to the US copyright term was a “big mistake.” Indeed, there is a consensus among policymakers, economists, and academics that lengthy copyright extensions impose costs that far outweigh their benefits. Why? The benefits are minuscule—economists (including five Nobel laureates) have shown that term extension does not spur additional creativity. At the same time, it causes enormous harm, locking away millions of older works that are no longer generating any revenue for the copyright holders. Films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them. The works of historians and journalists are incomplete. Artists find their cultural heritage off limits.
The public domain enables the rediscovery and reuse of works that might otherwise be forgotten. Empirical studies have shown that public domain books are less expensive, available in more editions and formats, and more likely to be in print—see here, here, and here. The works highlighted above are just a tiny snapshot of what will be copyright-free. Many more are waiting to be found and appreciated.
While the arrival of works into the public domain is cause for celebration, the length of the copyright term means that even though works from 1929 are legally available, this does always not mean they are actually available. Many films from the era have been lost forever. Even the successful films we have highlighted here are incomplete—footage is missing from The Broadway Melody, Gold Diggers of Broadway, Show Boat, and Say It With Songs.
The fact that works from 1929 are legally available also does not mean that rights holders won't continue to claim copyright over them. In 2023 we covered the Sherlock Holmes saga. The ingenious detective and his faithful sidekick Dr. Watson had been in the public domain for a long time. But that did not stop Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. from demanding licensing fees. Most people simply paid up. But when Leslie Klinger, a lawyer and Sherlock Holmes scholar, fought back, a court decisively confirmed that all of the elements in the out-of-copyright Sherlock Holmes stories are “free for public use.”
The Doyle estate’s business strategy is plain: charge a modest license fee for which there is no legal basis, in the hope that the "rational" writer or publisher asked for the fee will pay it rather than incur a greater cost, in legal expenses, in challenging the legality of the demand…only Klinger (so far as we know) resisted. In effect he was a private attorney general, combating a disreputable business practice — a form of extortion…It’s time the estate, in its own self-interest, changed its business model. Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate (7th Cir. 2014)
Such court decisions have not deterred other rights holders from claiming copyright over public domain properties. To take one example, the owners of the rights to Charlie Chaplin’s films have been sending aggressive letters to small community theaters telling them that they cannot screen Chaplin films that are legally in the public domain. The letters contain assertions about US copyright law that are, to use the technical term, bogus. To be sure, Chaplin was a genius and his successors have legitimate rights over his still-copyrighted films. But they do not have the right to squelch activities that are entirely legal.
The Chaplin Office nevertheless claims that the 1925 film The Gold Rush cannot be screened because the copyright in the underlying screenplay does not expire until 70 years after Chaplin’s death, or the end of 2047, because Chaplin was British and his copyright was restored under special rules for works by foreign authors. (They focus on the screenplay because the film entered the public domain in 1953 due to non-renewal of its copyright.) Even if this restoration met copyright’s requirements (it does not appear to) there is a more basic mistake in their calculation: they cite to the wrong provision of US copyright law, §303, for the life + 70 term, ignoring that it is only for works that were “created but not published or copyrighted before January 1, 1978.” The Copyright Office records show that the screenplay was copyrighted in 1925, and for such works the law states that the copyright lasts for “the remainder of the term of copyright that the work would have otherwise been granted in the United States,” which is 95 years under §304 of the Copyright Act, making the work public domain in 2021. Case closed.
What are the basic rules for determining whether something is public domain?
How long does copyright last in the United States? The 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act gave works published or registered before 1978 a 95-year term, expiring on January 1 after the conclusion of the 95th year. Doing the math, you add 96 years to the publication date. Works from 1929 were copyrighted for 95 years—through 2024—and are in the public domain January 1, 2025. This year's featured works are in the public domain because of either a 1929 registration or publication with a 1929 copyright notice. We were also able to track down the renewal data indicating that they are still in-copyright through the end of 2024 and entering the public domain in 2025.
Works published before 1978 had to meet certain requirements to be eligible for the full 95-year term—they had to be published with a copyright notice, and works from before 1964 also had to have their copyrights renewed after an initial 28-year term. Works published from 1978 through 3/1/1989 without a notice had to register their copyrights within five years to fix the lack of copyright notice. This means that many works published after 1929 might technically be in the public domain. However, as a practical matter, users sometimes have to assume they’re still copyrighted (or risk a lawsuit) because the relevant copyright information is difficult to find. We do not have clear and comprehensive records of copyright ownership and older records can be fragmentary, confused, or lost. In addition, as mentioned earlier, the concept of "publication" is important and has a special meaning under copyright law. It refers to when the work was sold or distributed to the general public with the authority of the copyright owner. Determining whether and when publication occurred can be complicated and vary depending on the kind of work—with music from before 1978, for example, only distribution in written form counted as a publication.
For pre-1978 works that were never published or registered, the term is different: life-plus-70 years for works by natural persons, and 120 years from creation for works of corporate authorship. In this category, works created by people who died in 1954 are in the public domain in 2025. Newer works created since 1978 are also treated differently from those published before 1978. Works by natural persons from 1978 forward have a life-plus-70 term, while works of corporate authorship are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. This is the copyright term for works created today, and there are no longer notice or renewal requirements.
What about foreign works? Some countries have a life-plus-50 term and many others, including EU countries, have a life-plus-70-year term, even for the older works that have the 95-year term in the US. This means that works might be copyrighted in one country and copyright-free in another. For example, Tintin enters the US public domain in 2025 but is still copyrighted in the EU until 2054, because the author died in 1983. In life-plus-70 jurisdictions, works from authors who died in 1954 are public domain this year, so they are celebrating a different set of works on Public Domain Day. How do you know which law applies to you? As a general matter, courts have said that users are governed by the law in the jurisdiction where they are using the creative work. But this inquiry can be more complicated and depend on the circumstances surrounding the use.
In the US, many foreign works from 1929 are copyrighted until 2025 because of a provision that, in 1996, restored copyright over certain foreign works that had fallen into the US public domain because of non-compliance with notice or renewal requirements. This restored term applies to many of the foreign works we are highlighting. You can learn more about how this functions from the Copyright Office's circular Copyright Restoration Under the URAA. If the owners of copyright in foreign works filed a Notice of Intent to Enforce their restored copyright you can find that information here. You can also find copyright restoration records in the Copyright Office records or the Copyright Office’s search portal here.
What is the copyright term for sound recordings? The Music Modernization Act’s “Classics Protection and Access Act” established a timeline for old recordings to enter the public domain. Recordings first published between 1923–1946 are public domain in January 2024–2047 (the year after a 100-year term). Then there is a ten-year pause from 2048–2058. After that, recordings first published between 1947–1956 are public domain in January 2058–2067, after a 110-year term. The term for all remaining recordings first fixed from 1957 until February 15, 1972 ends on February 15, 2067. Note that the term of protection for sound recordings in other countries is different from the one in the US: in the EU it is 70 years, and elsewhere it is 50 years.
[1]Our featured works are only entering the public domain under US copyright law. The copyright term for older works is different in other countries. In the EU, works from authors who died in 1954 are going into the public domain in 2025 after a life-plus-70 year term. As a general matter, under the principle of lex loci delicti, users are governed by the law in the jurisdiction where they are using the creative work. See Itar-Tass Russian News Agency v. Russian Kurier, Inc., 153 F.3d 82 (2d Cir. 1998). But this inquiry can be more complicated and fact-specific.
[2] Even though a work is still in-copyright, you may legally use it in certain ways if your activity qualifies for copyright’s “fair use” exception.
[3] In the US, only the author’s works from 1929 and earlier are in the public domain, not all of the other work published by that author. With regard to newly copyright-free works, only the original versions published in 1929 are entering the US public domain. Later versions of them—adaptations, movies, or translations—may still be copyrighted. However the later copyright only covers newly added creative material. The original content from the 1929 work remains free. If a film has been restored or reconstructed, only original and creative additions are eligible for copyright; if a restoration faithfully mimics the preexisting film, it does not contain newly copyrightable material. Putting skill, labor, and money into a project is not enough to qualify it for copyright. The Supreme Court has made clear that “the sine qua non of copyright is originality.” As you look through these works from 1929, please note that they offer a temporal cross section of our cultural past, capturing the era in its complexity. Unfortunately many of the works from 1929 contain racist and sexist stereotypes and demeaning language. When such works enter the public domain, anyone is free to critique and remake them, even if doing so goes beyond what would be allowed under copyright’s fair use doctrine.
[4]The Maltese Falcon initially appeared as a series of five installments in Black Mask magazine. Even though the final installment was published in January 1930, it was copyrighted in December 1929, making the full story public domain in 2025. The book version of The Maltese Falcon was then published in 1930—while it made textual edits to the serialized version, the plot and events are the same as the public domain story.
[5] Both An American in Paris and Bolero were written and performed in 1928, but the copyright records show a date of 1929. Under copyright law at the time, musical compositions were not copyrighted until a manuscript was published with a copyright notice, and we did not find sheet music with a 1928 copyright notice. Therefore, in an abundance of caution, we did not highlight them until 2025.
[6] Note that US copyright law allows you to cover a song without permission while it is still copyrighted under the “compulsory license” in §115, so long as you do not “change the basic melody or fundamental character” of the original song and pay a pre-set royalty rate. When a song is in the public domain you can make covers without complying with this provision, and you can also make other adaptations, performances, and interpolations.
[7] See the Copyright Office Compendium. Courts have held that being “nice,” having a “cocky attitude,” and being “young, attractive, and sarcastic” are not independently copyrightable character traits. See Shame on You Prods. v. Banks (C.D. Cal. 2015, aff’d 9th Cir. 2017); Campbell v. Walt Disney Co. (N.D. Cal. 2010); Gable v. Nat’l Broad. Co. (C.D. Cal. 2010).
[8]This decision was driven in part by the unusual circumstances of the case. Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, had sold his rights to Warner Brothers, who was then trying to stop Hammett from using the characters he originally created in new stories.
Written by Jennifer Jenkins. Special thanks to Sean Dudley for researching works and images from 1929 and creating video content and to Michael Wright and Isaiah Cooper for building this site.
Public Domain Day 2025 by Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
This website is not official legal advice. Instead, it is a summary of United States law relevant to the public domain and a guide to some of the works entering the public domain in 2025.
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James continues a tradition of retelling iconic works from new character perspectives. When author Alice Randall sought to revisit Gone With the Wind from the slaves’ perspective in The Wind Done Gone (2001), she was sued for copyright infringement. Gone With the Wind is copyrighted until 2032, and Randall only won the right to publish her work after a stressful and expensive lawsuit. (Full disclosure: I know it was stressful because I was one of her lawyers. Remarkably, the book was initially banned by a district court decision before the ban was lifted by the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.)
When Mickey Mouse 1.0 went into the public domain last year, he joined a host of other public domain characters—Winnie-the-Pooh, Sherlock Holmes, Snow White, Cinderella, Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, Robin Hood, Santa Claus, and the Wonderful Wizard of Oz characters, to name a few. This year, we get new iterations of Mickey and Minnie, and the first versions of Popeye and Tintin (plus the dog Snowy). Looking ahead, an exciting new cast of characters will become public domain in the coming years: Betty Boop and Pluto (originally named Rover) in 2026, Goofy in 2028 (originally named Dippy Dawg), Mary Poppins and Donald Duck in 2030, Superman in 2034, Batman in 2035, Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny in 2036, and Wonder Woman in 2037.
