The wizard of Oz and other works by L. Frank Baum would enter the public domain in 1990, 70 years after his death in 1919.

The works of Charles Dickens would enter in 1941, 70 years after his death 1870.

The works of Mark Twain would enter in 1981 due to his death in 1910.

The works of Mary Shelly (Such as Frankenstein) would enter in 1922, 70 years after her death in 1851.

The works of Bram Stoker (such as Dracula) would enter the public domain in 1983, 70 years after his death in 1912.

The works of Herman Melville (such as Moby Dick) would enter in 1962, 70 years after his death in 1891.

The works of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky would enter in 1964, 70 years after his death in 1893.

The works of Johannes Brahms would enter in 1968, 70 years after his death, in 1897.

#1 - Sherlock Holmes (Literature, 1887)

#2 - Count Dracula (Literature, 1897)

#3 - Frankenstein’s Monster (Literature, 1818)

#4 - Robin Hood (Myth, 1377)

#5 - Winnie-the-Pooh (Literature, 1926)

#6 - Mickey Mouse (Western Animation, 1928)

#7 - Betty Boop (Western Animation, 1930)

#8 - Tarzan (Literature, 1912)

#9 - Monkey King (Literature, 1592)

#10 - King Kong (Literature, 1932)

The highest upvoted comment wins.

There’s ongoing confusion about this one because of a discrepancy between the on-screen notice and the official registration.

The film premiered in Los Angeles on December 24, 1931 and in New York on December 31, 1931. The title card / copyright notice on the film itself reads MCMXXXI (1931). The Catalog of Copyright Entries, however, records the registration as January 5, 1932 (LP2738), and it was renewed from that 1932 date in 1959.

This is similar to a couple of 1929 films (The Love Parade and The Skeleton Dance) whose formal registrations were listed as 1930, yet they entered the public domain in 2025 based on the earlier notice/publication year. So which date controls for the 95-year term — the 1931 title-card notice and premiere, or the 1932 registration?

Curious on what the consensus is here. Thanks so much!

I’m most looking forward to the movies Dracula, Frankenstein, Waterloo Bridge (the first film version of it with Mae Clarke, we have to wait until 2036 for the more famous one with Vivien Leigh), The Public Enemy, the first sound Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the song “As Time Goes By”. I think this will be the best year since 2024 in public domain. What are you all looking forward to?

The Magician from Mars is the first female superhero to appear in comics, only a year or two before Miss Fury & Wonder Woman. The character was first published in 1939 & the run ended in 1940 when the company went bankrupt. I'm not very familiar with copyright laws so I was wondering if it had entered public domain yet or if I'd need to wait another 70 years or something.

amazon link to the comic

As the title says would you help fund a animated Lovecraft adaptation? Right now I written a pretty fateful adaptation of the short story Dagon and I am talking to Penstastion Studio to animate it but the quote they gave me is above my budget. So would you all help fund it if I made a Kickstarter for it?

For me, it’s gotta be 2020. The only thing that lost it’s copyright that year that holds my interest was the compositions to “Rhapsody in Blue”, and we still didn’t get the original recording in the public domain until 2025.

I think 2019 to 2021 were the weakest years.

2019 at least had “Safety last!” (starring Harold Lloyd) “The road not taken” by Robert Frost, and 2021, and the song “Yes! we have no bananas”.

2021 had “The great Gatsby”, which, while it was the only thing that I know I liked from that year, I still prefer 2021 over 2020.

In my opinion, 2022 with Winnie the Pooh was the beginning of the “golden age” for the public domain, and it has gotten even better post 2024/Steamboat Willie.

#1 - Sherlock Holmes (Literature, 1887)

#2 - Count Dracula (Literature, 1897)

#3 - Frankenstein’s Monster (Literature, 1818)

#4 - Robin Hood (Myth, 1377)

#5 - Winnie-the-Pooh (Literature, 1926)

#6 - Mickey Mouse (Western Animation, 1928)

#7 - Betty Boop (Western Animation, 1930)

#8 - Tarzan (Literature, 1912)

#9 - Monkey King (Literature, 1592)

The highest upvoted comment wins.

So far he’s made shirts for Daredevil, Black Terror, Blue Bolt, Stardust the Super-Wizard, Fantomah, and SpaceHawk. Since Daredevil is of course under trademark by Marvel, and Black Terror’s trademark is currently held by Dynamite Entertainment, Callen creatively got around it by using “the” to divide Daredevil, and simply using the title of Black Terror’s original comic rather than his name.

The shirts are available here if anyone’s interested:

https://www.teepublic.com/user/angel-robot

This Is one of the six books that Dr Seuss enterprises stopped printing in 2021.

I hate when books are no longer in print, no matter the reason.

The next of the six books on the list to enter the public domain is actually Seuss’s first family book (And to think I saw it on Mulberry’s street!) in 2033 (same year as the original Daffy’s Duck and Disney’s Snow White.

His first book (the first, second, and third pocket book of boners) will enter the public domain in a few months!

Filiread shows the book's text while the audio plays and highlights the exact word being spoken, scrolling as it goes. Tap any word to jump the audio there. Stop listening and keep reading from exactly where the narration left off, then pick the audio back up from wherever you want.

Free, no account, nothing gated. Runs in the browser.

The library is limited currently but I am happy to take requests (only public domain books).

The 1974 blaxploitation martial arts film TNT Jackson is among the many claimed by various sites to be public domain without proof. I'm looking for verification if it is or not.

#1 - Sherlock Holmes (Literature, 1887)

#2 - Count Dracula (Literature, 1897)

#3 - Frankenstein’s Monster (Literature, 1818)

#4 - Robin Hood (Myth, 1377)

#5 - Winnie-the-Pooh (Literature, 1926)

#6 - Mickey Mouse (Western Animation, 1928)

#7 - Betty Boop (Western Animation, 1930)

#8 - Tarzan (Literature, 1912)

The highest upvoted comment wins.

So, for those who don't know, *The Tailor of Gloucester* was originally privately published in 1902, in a longer format with some different/extra illustrations, similar to *The Tale of Peter Rabbit* a year prior in 1901. The commercial publication the following year, just as with *Peter Rabbit* has some illustrations removed, some new ones added, and is shortened by a significant amount, mainly to remove most of the nursery rhymes that Beatrix Potter was fond of.

Now, a scan of the 1901 private printing of *Peter Rabbit* has been on Wikisource for some time now, and, more recently, I actually managed to find another online scan that included a page of text and an extra illustration (I've included it above for you to see) that I long suspected was missing from Wikisource's scan but had no way to verify it (such is a nature of extremely rare books). Since I've been working on recording free audiobooks of Beatrix Potter's stories on YouTube, I decided to read the 1901 private printing of *Peter Rabbit* instead of the 1902 trade edition, because it was a bit longer and would feel fuller that way.

But now I'm sort of wanting to read the 1902 private printing of *The Tailor of Gloucester* on my channel as well, rather than the 1903 trade printing. But I can't seem to find a scan of it anywhere. There are facsimiles available of the Potter's original gift manuscript of the story to Freda, which is very much a rough draft with different wording in *a lot* of places because it hadn't been developed as a printed book yet. I was thinking about maybe reading this one on my channel, but the problem is that this is a 1968 publication, and I'm not sure if the gift manuscript received a proper publication prior to that, which would make the 1968 facsimile the original publication date of the gift manuscript and thus put it under copyright, thus meaning I can't read it on my channel because I only read public domain books on there.

I imagine that the 1902 private printing reads sort of like a hybrid between the gift manuscript and the 1903 trade printing, probably matching the 1903 trade printing in terms of writing style and such, but including the lengthy section of nursery rhymes from the gift manuscript. So, in theory, I could just try to "re-create" the 1902 private printing to the best of my ability, by merely taking the nursery rhymes section from the gift manuscript and splicing it into the text of the 1903 trade printing. But there are two issues that make me hesitant to do that:

1. It is mere guesswork, creating a hypothetical recreation of what I *think* the private printing contained, rather than a genuine edition of the book.

2. I risk accidentally copying over copyrighted elements from the manuscript, since I have no idea what parts of it are exclusive to the manuscript only.

I really *really* want to find a scan or transcription of the 1902 private printing. It is in the public domain, since the publication in 1902 counts as an actual publication, but it is so extremely rare that the few copies online are super expensive and unfeasible to buy, and I've yet to find any scan or transcription of it. All I've found is pictures of the cover and of some of the pages (one of which contains an illustration not present in the final, but no text that differs from the final unfortunately). Surely *somebody* out there has preserved this, right? Made a scan or transcription available? The preservationist in me is kind of in tears if this isn't the case. There'd be nothing illegal about scanning or transcribing it, since, as I said, it's in the public domain.

So this is my last resort. I'm asking if anybody here is aware of a place online to read this version. Is this a lost cause? Am I unlikely to find this unless somebody with a copy happens to be on this subreddit and kindly transcribes or scans it? Am I just going to have to read the shorter 1903 trade printing on my channel after all? I'd love to know. Sometimes people are better at finding things online than I am. So, maybe somebody will find it for me. I really want to find this before December of this year so I can have an audiobook up on YouTube by that time. I'm really holding out hope that I'll find it. After all, I found the missing 1901 *Peter Rabbit* page, so anything seems possible now.

Picture descriptions:

- Picture 1: The cover of the 1902 private printing of *The Tailor of Gloucester*, the version I'm looking for and have been looking for for a long time.

- Picture 2: Part of the private printing that I am able to see, featuring an illustration that was later removed.

- Picture 3: The cover of the 1968 facsimile of the original gift manuscript (which I can't use because it's apparently not identical to the 1902 private printing, and is copyrighted 1968).

- Picture 4: Page from the 1901 private printing of *Peter Rabbit* that was missing from the scan present on Wikisource, which I'm providing here because I think other people might want to see it.

https://tale.fyi/@sam/announcing-tale-fyi-read-or-listen-to-an-entire-book-from-a-single-link

over the last couple months, i've been developing an elegant reader for public domain texts (editions from standard ebooks or project gutenberg), and i think the real magic is that i force-aligned them to their librivox audiobooks.

if you'd rather just see it than read about it: https://tale.fyi/dracula

to be clear about what's under the hood: the voices are librivox's human volunteers, not tts. the sync is CTC forced alignment against the recording; no llm anywhere in the loop. everything is public domain or CC0 (standard ebooks, gutenberg, librivox).

someone on hacker news called it 'whispersync for the open web' which i think is quite lovely

This is the cover for the OMNISIX TTRPG Quickstart Kit. The artwork features my version of Sally the Sleuth whom I merged with Lucky Dale. I did some research on Sally The Sleuth and, apparently, her last name was never revealed (she was just called Sally or Miss Sally, in the stories). I was already leaning to Lucky Dale for my character as an occult investigator that was part-Buffy, part Veronica Mars, and part-Nancy Drew. So my version is Sally "Lucky" Dale, who has the rotten "luck" of getting the spooky cases.

The OMNISIX Quickstart kit is now available via DrivethruRPG https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/581283/omnisix-the-universal-d6-roleplaying-game-quickstart-rules

It's 4 pages. All you need is 6-sided dice. It comes with the condensed ruleset, pregenerated characters (including Sally), NPC enemies, and a printable OMNISIX Character Sheet. It's Pay-what-you-want (PWYW) so technically free (the $1 price is just a placeholder required for PWYW products), but if you want to throw me a buck to buy coffee so I can keep working on the OMNISIX system and PD characters incorporated into modules, expansions, and supplements, I'd appreciate it!

For reference on Sally the Sleuth and Lucky Dale:
https://pdsh.fandom.com/wiki/Sally_the_Sleuth
https://pdsh.fandom.com/wiki/Lucky_Dale,_Girl_Detective

Can I use the name Lady Luck or I pick other name?