A farewell to copyright protection for Hemingway, Hammett — and Popeye

The Marx Brothers’ first movie, the early iterations of the comic strip character Popeye, and Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell To Arms” are all entering the public domain on Jan. 1, 2025.

That means those works — as well as thousands of other books, songs, characters and pieces of art — are due to lose their copyright protection on Jan. 1. After that date, anyone can lawfully copy, share or build upon those works without having to pay.

Let’s say you’re a hip-hop artist and for whatever reason, you want to spit bars over a sample of the jazz standard “Everybody Loves My Baby” with Louis Armstrong on cornet.

In 2024, that’s a hassle. “You’ve got to clear the sound recording copyright, and that is easier said than done,” explained Jennifer Jenkins, a professor at Duke Law School. “You have to figure out who owns it. You’ve got to find them. You’ve got to get them to respond to you, and you’ve got to negotiate a deal.”

But once the ball drops at midnight Jan. 1, you can remix that Satchmo recording to your heart’s content, no contracts required.

Part of the point of the public domain is to let new artists build new value from old art, Jenkins noted. Look no further than the nearly $600 million in box office value generated from a fairly popular musical.

“A lot of people probably enjoyed ‘Wicked’ this year. ‘Wicked’ builds on the public domain works from L. Frank Baum, who wrote ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,'” she said.

Literary masterpieces like “A Farewell to Arms” have their own cottage industry of new editions that emerge when works lose copyright protections.

Hemingway scholar Verna Kale at Penn State University was asked to produce a classroom version of “The Sun Also Rises” when it reached the public domain a few years back.

“I edited ‘The Sun Also Rises’ with attention to Hemingway’s — uh, the things that he wanted for that novel that he wasn’t allowed to do because of censorship at the time,” she said. Shockingly, Hemingway was a fan of risqué language.

Although there’s another enthusiastic cheerleader for the public domain that college English departments may not be so fond of: generative artificial intelligence. Once “Farewell To Arms” loses its copyright protections, the OpenAI’s of the world don’t have to fear a lawsuit from the Hemingway estate when they use it to train their robots.