A children’s book that serves as an apt metaphor for the progress of the public domain—a small, overworked, and underestimated locomotive straining to make its way up a mountain—is among the works that join the public domain at the start of 2026.
The Little Engine That Could, the 1930 version of the children’s classic written by Arnold Munk under the pen name of Watty Piper and illustrated with drawings by Lois Lenski, will see its US copyright protection expire at the end of 2025. The same thing will happen to other creative works published in 1930 and sound recordings released in 1925 in America.
Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in ‘Private Lives’ on Broadway in 1931. (Credit: Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
The public domain class of 2026, as covered in a lengthy and info-dense post from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, features an impressive range of books, movies, artwork and musical compositions, and recordings.
In addition to my own favorite example—because I loved that book as a kid and have a hardcover copy of The Little Engine that was my dad’s seventh-birthday present—the written works entering the public domain include William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, the first four Nancy Drew books from Mildred Benson writing under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, and Noël Coward’s Private Lives.
The 1930-vintage movies with expiring copyrights feature All Quiet on the Western Front, the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, King of Jazz (with Bing Crosby’s first feature-film spot), and multiple Marlene Dietrich vehicles (Morocco and The Blue Angel).
This crop of creative works did their part to entertain Americans as the Great Depression took hold, and Duke Law School professors James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins draw some parallels between then and now in their post.
“In King of Jazz, a man gets drunk and stammers: ‘You know what’s the matter with this country? It’s a tariff! That’s who!’, referring to the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that deepened the Great Depression,” they write.
1930 also saw the first appearances of such cartoon characters as Betty Boop, Goofy (then called Rover in Disney’s The Picnic), and Blondie and Dagwood (but not his signature overloaded sandwich, which Duke’s researchers could not trace back farther than 1935).
Art from that year includes such pioneering works of abstract art as Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, while its musical compositions feature George and Ira Gershwin’s “I’ve Got a Crush on You” and Stuart Gorrell and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind.”
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Sound recordings exit copyright on a different schedule as set by a 2018 law clarifying prior uncertainties about the legal status of pre-1972 recordings.
If you’re looking for a timely public-domain soundtrack to play right after midnight or at a New Year’s Day brunch, your new-for-2026 options include Marian Anderson singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and Louis Armstrong’s performance in “The St. Louis Blues.”
Americans have been waiting this long for copyrights on these pre-WWII works to expire because of a series of extensions of copyright terms from the 14 years set by the Copyright Act of 1790. Decades of entertainment-industry lobbying eventually led to Congress retroactively extending the term of existing copyrights for pre-1978 works to 95 years in 1998.
That statute also set terms for post-1978 works: an author’s life plus 70 years from first publication, or 95 years from first publication for corporate-owned works.
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At the time, many scholars of intellectual property decried that law as an unnecessary favor by Congress for Hollywood. And they still see it as a mistake.
“We’ve had copyright taken way out of control,” Internet Archive founder and director Brewster Kahle said at a digital-rights event in Washington in October. “Something’s gone really, really wrong.”
That term-extension law dammed up the public domain for two decades until those reset terms expired in 2019. But each New Year’s Day since then has seen the liberation of a new year’s worth of creative works. As a result, you’re now free to read, watch, and listen to such classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (the class of 2021), Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis (2023), Mickey Mouse’s film debut in Steamboat Willie (2024), and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (2025).
Works in the public domain are not just free to copy and share but to rewrite and remix as you wish. “To tell new stories, we draw from older ones,” Boyle and Jenkins write. “One work of art inspires another—that is how the public domain feeds creativity.”
So, if you want to publish a 2026-relevant version of The Little Engine—maybe involving a plucky NextGen Acela train—have at it. And if you get stuck after you’ve begun writing your own version, keep telling yourself, “I think I can.”
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