Famous Books, Films, and Music from 1930 Enter the Public Domain

In 2026, a whole attic trunk of creative works from 1930, plus sound recordings from 1925, officially tumbles into the U.S. public domain. Translation: they are now free to share, remix, quote, reboot, and generally poke at without asking permission or writing a check to anyone’s great-grandchildren.

The newly liberated lineup is impressively eclectic. Early incarnations of pop culture icons are now fair game, including Betty Boop as she appeared in Dizzy Dishes, Pluto back when he answered to “Rover” in The Chain Gang, the first four Nancy Drew mysteries, and the original Blondie & Dagwood comic strips, before domestic bliss became a lifelong endurance sport.

The literary side of 1930 is especially stacked. Newly public works include Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage and The Mysterious Mr. Quin, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Children’s classics like The Little Engine That Could and Swallows and Amazons are also in the mix, along with the first appearances of Dick and Jane in the Elson Basic Readers, still ready to run, jump, and politely model sentence structure.

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Film buffs also win big. Movies from 1930 entering the public domain include the Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, Howard Hughes’ aviation epic Hell’s Angels, Marlene Dietrich’s star-making turn in The Blue Angel, Greta Garbo’s first talking role in Anna Christie, and King of Jazz, notable for both its eye-popping color and Bing Crosby’s first feature film appearance.

Music gets its moment too. Classic compositions from 1930 like “Georgia on My Mind” and “I Got Rhythm” are now public, while sound recordings from 1925, including Bessie Smith’s “St. Louis Blues” featuring Louis Armstrong, enter the public domain under the Music Modernization Act. In other words, the jazz age just became legally remixable.

Art and science are also clocking out of copyright. Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow is now free to reproduce without a lecture from a licensing department. Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents is public in its original German, finally allowing everyone to quote it while remaining deeply uncomfortable. Some of Albert Einstein’s seminal works are now public in Europe and 70 other countries, which feels appropriate for ideas that already belonged to the universe.

For those who enjoy scrolling lists of newly unshackled culture, a more extensive rundown is available from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain and on Wikipedia. Bring snacks.