While Mickey Mouse is getting most of the attention surrounding Public Domain Day 2024, it is worth noting other works from 1928 that are also entering the public domain. Here is a sampling from research compiled by The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School.

Books and plays include House at Pooh Corner, which introduced Tigger, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and works by such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, W.E.B. Du Bois, Agatha Christie and Robert Frost. The Circus, written, starring and directed by Charlie Chaplin, is emblematic of the last years of silent films. Musical compositions such as Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love) and Sonny Boy from the film The Singing Fool made the list this year. Also entering the public domain are sound recordings from 1923 including Yes! We Have No Bananas and Who’s Sorry Now.

Works in the public domain are available without permission to share unaltered or to be reimaged. Community theaters can screen the films and youth orchestras can perform the music for free. The Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works, many of which have not even been commercially available in the recent past, available online for analysis and retelling. New generations have been introduced to Shakespeare and Greek mythology through contemporary films, cartoons, books, plays, musicals, video games and songs and now these 20th century works can be freely available as well. For example, after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby entered the public domain in 2021, Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful reinvented the book from the perspective of the Jordan Baker character, and Jillian Cantor’s Beautiful Little Fools retells the story through the voices of its female characters, Jordan, Daisy Buchanan, and Catherine McCoy. NPR’s Planet Money even created an audio book and read the entire book on the air.