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Popeye, Tintin and more will enter the public domain in the new year
An enlarged cartoon of Tintin pictured on display at Paris’ Pompidou Cultural Center in 2006. The Belgian cub reporter is among the characters and works entering the public domain in 2025.
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Jan. 1 marks the dawn of a new era for Popeye and Tintin. It’s the day the nonagenarian cartoon characters officially enter the U.S. public domain along with a treasure trove of other iconic works.
The copyrights of thousands of films, songs and books expire in 2025, making them instantly available for people to use, share and adapt. The list includes classics like Virginia Woolf’s book A Room of One’s Own, the Fats Waller song “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and the Marx Brothers’ first feature film, The Cocoanuts.
The main thing they have in common is their age — under U.S. copyright law, their terms all expire after 95 years. All of the works entering the public domain next year are from 1929, except for sound recordings, which (because they are covered by a different law) come from 1924.
“Copyright’s awesome … but the fact that rights eventually expire, that’s a good thing, too, because that’s the wellspring for creativity,” says Jennifer Jenkins, the director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, which spends months poring over records to compile the most famous examples.
Once in the public domain, these works become fodder for remakes, spinoffs and other adaptations.
That explains the recent wave of horror films starring Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, characters that entered the public domain in 2024 and 2023 respectively. The trend seems poised to continue: Jenkins says there are already three Popeye slasher flicks in the works.
“They’re capitalizing on the incongruity of this comic book character in a different genre and they get a lot of buzz,” she adds. “[But] when I sit back and look at the universe of remakes of public domain characters or works … the things that we still talk about that stand the test of time don’t tend to be these buzzworthy, kind of ew, grossed-out features.”
More enduring examples include West Side Story drawn from Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma, Percival Everett’s 2024 book James (a retelling of Huckleberry Finn) and Wicked, the musical-turned-movie prequel to L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz.
But these artifacts don’t only become fodder for big-name directors and authors — they’re available for anyone who wants to use them, from artists to high school orchestra directors.
Jenkins says she gets “adorable emails” from people who are drawing their own little Winnie the Pooh cartoons, and parents whose kids are talented musicians, eager to finally be able to perform certain compositions publicly and post them online.
In other words, the impact of public domain works extends far beyond the box office and Billboard charts.
“I’m excited about those things that not everybody’s going to notice — people really re-discovering some of these older works and engaging with them and appreciating them and making them their own,” she adds.
Here’s a look at some of the works that are just days away from the public domain:
Characters
A helium-filled Popeye balloon participates in the 33rd Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York in 1959, three decades after his comic strip debut.
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Tintin the brave cub reporter — and his dog, Snowy — will enter the public domain in the U.S. well before they will in the European Union, where they are copyrighted until 2054. That’s because EU copyright terms extend 70 years past creators’ deaths, and Belgian cartoonist Hergé died in 1983.
Closer to home there’s E.C. Segar’s Popeye, who made his debut in a January 1929 Thimble Theatre cartoon strip. He sports his signature pipe, sailor outfit, anchor tattoo and sense of humor, responding when asked if he’s a sailor: “Ja think I’m a cowboy?”
He could have a whole new set of adventures starting in 2025. But there’s a catch: Popeye didn’t start deriving his strength from spinach until 1932.
As Jenkins explains, many cartoon characters develop over time and have been in copyrighted works year after year, meaning certain aspects of them may come into the public domain in different years. So only the original 1929 versions of Popeye and Tintin are fair game, at least for now.
“Definitely the Popeye from 1929 and everything that he says, all of his characteristics, his personality, his sarcasm … that’s public domain,” she says. “The spinach, if you want to be on the safe side, you might want to wait.”
Films
The Wild Party, Clara Bow’s first talkie, was released in 1929, making it public domain in 2025.
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Similarly, the original Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse arrived in the public domain with much fanfare in 2024. In 2025, a dozen more Mickey animations will follow suit — including The Karnival Kid, in which he speaks for the first time.
“His very first words are ‘Hot dogs! Hot dogs!’ — so I guess that’s kind of cute,” Jenkins says. “And then he didn’t wear the white gloves in 1928, but next year, in 2025, we get the version of Mickey Mouse with the signature white gloves in the public domain.”
Sound is a big theme across the films making their public domain debut next year, since 1929 marked the end of the silent film era and the dawn of the sound film age.
The list includes the first sound films from major directors like Alfred Hitchcock (Blackmail), John Ford (The Black Watch) and Cecil B. DeMille (Dynamite), as well as Clara Bow’s first talkie, The Wild Party, and The Broadway Melody, the first sound film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.
Other notables include Walt Disney’s The Skeleton Dance (the first of the Silly Symphony shorts); King Vidor’s Hallelujah, the first major studio film with an all-Black cast; and Alan Crosland’s On With the Show, the first all-talking, all-color, feature-length film.
Books
From left: Ernest Hemingway in 1950, William Faulkner in 1950, and John Steinbeck in 1962.
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Among the many literary works entering the public domain next year are two of the most acclaimed books about World War I: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and the first English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front — both authors served in the war themselves.
The list includes several detective mysteries: Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen’s The Roman Hat Mystery, and Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie.
There are also some literary debuts, including John Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold, and Richard Hughes’ first novel A High Wind in Jamaica.
Musical compositions
George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” is among the musical compositions entering the public domain in 2025.
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The latest crop of compositions spans the era’s jazz standards, show tunes, pop music and more.
They include: Arthur Freed’s Singin’ in the Rain (which was featured in the film The Hollywood Revue of 1929, also entering public domain), George Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, Jack Yellen’s Happy Days Are Here Again (the campaign song for FDR’s 1932 presidential run), Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love? and Tiptoe Through the Tulips (the Joseph Burke version, not the 1968 Tiny Tim one).
“But if you felt like singing like Tiny Tim for some reason, and you could, you can record your own version of Tiptoe Through the Tulips next year because that song’s going to be public domain,” Jenkins says.
The Center for the Study of Public Domain specifies that musical compositions refer to “the music and lyrics that you might see on a piece of sheet music, not the recordings of those songs.” Those are covered by a separate copyright.
Sound recordings
Marian Anderson became the first Black singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1955. One of her early recordings from 1924 will enter the public domain next year.
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Under the 2018 Music Modernization Act, sound recordings are protected by copyright for 100 years. It’s the particular recordings that eventually enter the public domain, not the song’s music or lyrics or later recordings from those artists.
These are some of the 1924 performances that will become available for legal reuse in January: Marian Anderson’s “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Jelly Roll Morton’s “Shreveport Stomp,” “Deep Blue Sea Blues” by Clara Smith, and “Everybody Loves My Baby (But My Baby Don’t Love Nobody But Me)” recorded by Louis Armstrong and Clarence Williams’ Blue Five.
A Waymo robotaxi drives in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood this week.
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Police in San Mateo, Calif., posted Monday on social media that they had apprehended a pair of teenagers from a Waymo driverless robotaxi after the company alerted authorities to suspected criminal activity. It’s the latest incident involving video surveillance of passengers and others by autonomous vehicles — raising questions about the limits of privacy in such vehicles.
The Facebook post by the San Mateo County Police said: “Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!”
The 15-year-olds were allegedly drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns from the car, according to the police. They said Waymo’s systems detected behavior that then triggered a safety response, after which the company disabled the vehicle and contacted police.
Waymo’s cars, equipped with an array of cameras, microphones and other sensors to monitor passengers and other nearby vehicles, are becoming more common in cities across the United States. Experts say the detention of the two teens in San Mateo highlights a potential — but not inevitable — trade-off between privacy and convenience. It also questions the extent to which companies similar to Waymo are required to hand over private data, including audio and video of passengers, in situations where a crime is suspected.
NPR reached out to Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, for comment on the details of the San Mateo incident and how the company responded, but did not hear back. But on its website, the company says that as many as 29 cameras in its autonomous cars provide an all-around view and “are designed with high dynamic range and thermal stability, to see in both daylight and low-light conditions, and tackle more complex environments.”
“There already exist laws that govern duty to report or even duty to protect” for carriers such as Waymo, according to Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “The privacy problems arise when and if driverless carrier companies used such laws or ethical obligations as a pretext for blanket, indiscriminate accumulation of identifiable data for unspecified future purposes.”
That includes not just monitoring people inside the cars, but outside too. Take, for example, a hit-and-run investigation last year in Los Angeles. Media reported that the police inquiry was aided by video captured by a Waymo taxi that had a clear view of the crime. Critics suggested at the time that authorities were using the company’s vehicles as a mobile surveillance platform. And during 2025 protests in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns, demonstrators vandalized Waymos, apparently angry that video recorded by the vehicles could be used by police, although there is no evidence that happened.
In a transparency report, Google says it received nearly 290,000 requests from governments worldwide in the first six months of 2025 for disclosure of user information across all its platforms, including Waymo. The company says that in more than 80% of the requests in those six months, some information was disclosed. “Google carefully reviews each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases we object to producing any information at all,” the company says.
In an email to NPR, San Mateo Police Department spokesperson Jeanine Luna said that detaining the teens in the Waymo on Monday was “wholly appropriate” under the circumstances. “We received the call of a ‘firearm’ being shot from a moving vehicle,” she said. “Furthermore, the occupants were described as being possibly ‘intoxicated.’” she said.
“Being that the vehicle was disabled (the occupants had every right to exit the vehicle before police arrival, but they did not), a high-risk traffic stop was conducted to ensure the safety of all involved,” Luna added. “They were not arrested and were released to their parents, however, potential charges are still pending dependent on what the video from inside the vehicle shows.”
Autonomous taxis represent an ethical gray area
Robotaxis began to roll out across the U.S. in December 2018, when Waymo launched in Phoenix. These services have been used for less than a decade — so the norms surrounding them aren’t settled, experts agree.
The Facebook post may make Waymo passengers wonder what triggers a police intervention, says Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University. She has used Waymo’s driverless taxis and says ethically, the privacy issues surrounding them sit in a gray area. “There’s something about being in a car without another person that makes you think it’s private.”
“With all these recording devices, we don’t see them, [and] they’re not these obvious things being stuck in our faces,” Raicu adds.
That brings up a key issue: informed consent, Acquisti says.
“It is not clear the extent to which passengers … are reminded that when they step into the car, that they are being monitored, and most likely they are not told in its entirety how the data will be used,” he says.
Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity and privacy expert and professor at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, believes that Waymo does have a compelling interest in protecting its vehicles. He compares monitoring a robotaxi via cameras to a human taxi driver keeping an eye on passengers in the rearview mirror.
“Maybe the driverless car comes back … and it has all of its cushions slashed, and it’s like, ‘Who the hell did that? Let’s go and look at the tape,’” Schneier suggests. “You can’t have sex in the back of a taxi, right? Someone would say, ‘Stop it.’”
He concludes that some supervision makes sense. In an Uber rideshare, he notes, “most of the time there’s a camera recording the back seat.” (Uber says on its website that it allows drivers to install such cameras for the purpose of “fulfilling transportation services.”)
Waymo robotaxis, while a fairly common sight in the San Francisco Bay Area, are still a novelty in much of the country. And many people are hesitant to ride in one, according to a Pew Research Center poll published this month. The survey found that only 5% of Americans had ever ridden in a driverless car. Meanwhile, 71% of those polled said they would feel uncomfortable in one, with only 7% saying they would be “extremely or very comfortable” riding in one.
For that reason, experts who spoke with NPR said they were optimistic that it’s not too late to shift gears on privacy norms and policies surrounding these vehicles.
Acquisti doesn’t see why privacy measures can’t be built into driverless vehicles.
“I would immediately challenge the notion that people have to be monitored,” he says, noting that privacy-preserving technologies exist and can be installed.
“Driverless cars are coming, but they don’t have to come in this particular incarnation,” Raicu says. “They’re still being designed and redesigned. It’s early days.”
Donald Trump has terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide just a few months before the midterm elections, multiple outlets reported Thursday.
The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission were forced out on Thursday in different ways. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other two, Democratic appointees were notified of their terminations via email from the White House presidential personnel office.
“On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email, seen by Reuters, said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Election Assistance Commission serves as a “national clearinghouse of information on election administration”, accredits testing laboratories and certifies voting systems, and maintains the national mail-voter registration form developed by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, according to the commission’s website. The terminations follow Trump and top administration officials’ advocacy to change vote-by-mail requirements and investigations into the 2020 election outcome, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
“It is irresponsible and dangerous that this Administration remains dead set on causing chaos for our election officials across this country,” Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes said in a Thursday statement. “This move undermines the integrity of nonpartisan election administration.”
The 2002 law that established the commission, the Help America Vote Act, states the president can appoint replacements to the commission.
It is unclear how Trump will move ahead with the commission.
Reuters contributed reporting
Former U.S. Olympian David Hearn (left) walks with his attorney Norman Eisen to speak to reporters and protesters gathered after his arraignment at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
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Former U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn pleaded not guilty to damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in D.C. Superior Court Thursday morning.
Federal prosecutors charged Hearn with a single count of destruction of property causing more than $1,000 in damage to the pool.
Hearn has previously claimed, which his attorneys repeated during a short press conference outside the court, that he simply touched the water in the pool out of curiosity.
The Trump administration had just completed a $14 million renovation of the pool.
But shortly after the work finished, peeling paint and algae gathered in the water. The remodel has been largely criticized as a massive failure and waste of taxpayer dollars.
Superior Court Judge Carmen McLean released Hearn on his own recognizance. His next hearing is scheduled for Aug. 5.
Norm Eisen, one of Hearn’s attorneys, spoke to reporters outside of court following the hearing. He said the administration is using Hearn as a “scapegoat … for their own failures.”
“It is not a crime to touch the reflecting pool, to touch water in the United States of America,” he said.
Prosecutors say there is a host of evidence against Hearn.
This is a developing story.
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