Announcing the 2026 Public Domain Film Remix Contest Winners, Honorable Mentions & Finalists

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We’re thrilled to unveil the creativity of our top three winners and four honorable mentions in this year’s Public Domain Day Film Remix Contest. These remarkable films not only reimagined and transformed public domain works but also demonstrated the boundless potential of remixing creative works to create something new.

This year’s contest received more than 270 submissions from creators across 35 U.S. states, as well as Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, and 28 countries worldwide. All of the submissions can be viewed in a new collection at the Internet Archive: 2026 Public Domain Day Film Remix Contest collection.

Our judging panel was led by Catherine Kavanaugh of Screen360.tv with jurors Peter Stein, Rick Prelinger, Amber McKinney, and Brewster Kahle.

Watch the winning entries & honorable mentions below. View the full list of finalists.

FIRST PLACE: “Rhapsody, Reimagined” by Andrea Hale

About the film: Rhapsody, Reimagined reconfigures imagery from King of Jazz (1930) through collage, digital animation, and repetition set to a reimagined version of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

A woman in a striped shirt and beanie drumming.
Andrea Hale

Judge’s Comment: Andrea Hale’s sharp description: “Treating image as modular rather than linear, the film foregrounds systems of synchronization, reproduction, and spectacle,” signaled to the judges that we were in for a surprise. The stripped down remix of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue lifted us gently into a 1930s office scene in deco sherbert colors that deconstructed and rebuilt through a mind-blowing kaleidoscope of dancers, musicians, and other images from John Murray Anderson’s “ The King of Jazz”….finally landing us back on a moon…A fabulously fun use of archival footage – we all agreed, it was an aesthetic triumph! Congratulations to Andrea Hale

Andrea Hale is an artist working in animation and video editing. Her work emphasizes rhythm, repetition, and texture, using collage to recontextualize culturally established works by treating them as raw material rather than finished objects.

SECOND PLACE: “Battle Lines” by Jen Zhao and Aaron Sharp

About the film: The friendship and rivalry between two painters: Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg.

Selected Judge’s Comment: This is a neatly made little film that used 22 archival works and doesn’t quite escape the burden of telling the story of the feud between Mondrian and van Doesburg. It’s a perfectly pitched, tongue-in-cheek short doc(mock)umentary tracking their feud over the diagonal line. Masterful editing of inspired sources including Composition II in Red, Blue And Yellow by Mondrian (1930) and Jean Cocteau’s “Le Sang Un Poet” with costumes by Coco Chanel. It’s deft narration winks at parody yet unfolds the story in a memorable cadence to its tender end and sends viewers to research further. Congratulations to Jen Zhao and Aaron Sharp

A woman smiling softly into a camera.
Jen Zhao

Jen Zhao is a Canadian filmmaker, producer, and actor who is interested in autofictional works that explore reality, genre, and the experience of making art itself. She works with an ethos of “scrappiness”, creating films with whatever resources are on hand or easily accessible, which is exemplified in her short film Finding Nathan Fielder (With Jen Zhao). Jen has released work with Penguin Random House, Spotify, and Cosmic Soup Productions, and received her MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA.

A man with glasses and a beard smiling into the camera
Aaron Sharp

Aaron Sharp is a screenwriter and actor from Los Angeles. He has an MFA from UCLA TFT and loves acronyms. He is currently working on 8 Votes, a true-crime podcast that investigates how his best friend received only eight votes in his high school presidential election, and whether foul play was involved.

THIRD PLACE: “Farina & The Perpetual Shine Machine” by Ralphie Wilson

About the film: Allen “Farina” Hoskins hosts an interrogative look into the depiction of black life during the year 1930 in this short film, unease follows.

Ralphie Wilson

Selected Judge’s Comment: This film highlights terrific sourcing and intercutting of both uplifting and disturbing depictions of African and African American film imagery from 1930. Not at all gratuitous in its presentation of images from governmental, industrial and educational archives, the familiar comic expression of Our Gang’s Farina, Allen Hoskins, softens the disquieting impact and prompts further inquiry. The Hall-Johnson Choir’s spiritual directed by Broadway performer Juanita Hall (later known for “South Pacific”) elevated imagery and soundscore, further highlighting the conundrum in our fraught history. As director Ralphie Wilson stated in his description, “Unease follows.” Thank you and congratulations, Ralphie Wilson

Ralphie Wilson is a street photographer, editor and independent filmmaker from St. Louis, MO. He has a love for archive work and capturing The Black Experience throughout all mediums.

HONORABLE MENTION: “The Boots on the Western Front” by Thomas Biamonte

Thomas Biamonte

About the film: An anti-war short film that showcases the horror of modern warfare and its toll on the human psyche as seen in the 1930 Best Picture winner at the 3rd annual Academy Awards All Quiet on the Western Front. The film is paired with a 1915 reading of Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 Anti-War poem Boots.

Thomas Biamonte is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Hartford studying acting. He is a huge fan of the public domain and the internet archive and he is honored to be chosen as an Honorable Mention.

HONORABLE MENTION: “How’s the Play Going?” by Noel David Taylor

Noel David Taylor

About the film: An absurd comedy with the main character lost in time, disjointed in settings and confused by their surroundings. Sort of like that thing that happens when you realize you haven’t been paying attention to the film you’re watching.

Noel David Taylor is a filmmaker known for their alchemy of homemade nightmare comedy and an absurdist sense of tragedy.

HONORABLE MENTION: “Dream A Little Dream Of Me Reimagined” by Talissa Mehringer

About the film: A new short music-film remix celebrating the dynamism of 30s film choreography, the opulence of the sets, and the versatile talent of the featured stars.

Talissa Mehringer is a German/Mexican multimedia artist and filmmaker residing in Berlin. Her work springs from a desire to bring to life dreams and experiences filtered through the subconscious.

HONORABLE MENTION: “The Reality Engineer” by Konstantin

About the film: A comedy film that tells the story of a scientist who wants to help humanity live better by correcting reality itself. However, every good intention only makes the situation worse.

ALL FINALISTS (ALPHABETICAL BY TITLE)

In Praise of Pre-Hays: “Morocco” and the Public Domain

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Theo Unkrich (he/him) is a member of Internet Archive’s Patron Services team. His love of media preservation persists outside of Internet Archive in his writing and game design projects, which play with queerness, networks of community, and the Old Web.

This year’s cohort of films entering the public domain is one of the last of the pre-Code era: enjoy those depictions of excess liquor and “lustful embraces” while you can! From 1934 until 1968, the rigid guidelines known formally as the Motion Picture Production Code and more commonly as the Hays Code limited not only what could be depicted on screen, but also how, lest depictions of such immorality have the wrong effect on audiences. 

To my delight, Morocco (1930) is one of the many pre-Code films that entered the public domain on January 1st of this year. Directed by Josef von Sternberg, Morocco tells the story of French Foreign Legion soldier Tom Brown (Gary Cooper) and performer Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich), who meet, flirt, and eventually fall in love (despite the best efforts of wealthy suitor La Bessière, a jilted lover, and the ongoing war).

Watch Morocco:

The film is also famously queer, thanks largely to Dietrich’s performance as Amy Jolly in a scene in which she dons a top hat and full men’s evening wear to serenade the cabaret’s attendees. Most famous of all is the shot where Amy, with all the confidence and swagger in the world, bends to kiss a female audience member on the lips in one of the earliest same-gender kisses on screen. Marlene Dietrich herself was about as openly bisexual as one could be in the 20th century, and her work in this film carries the confidence of someone comfortable both with flouting and playing up gendered expectations of desirability.

Morocco does its best to ensure that neither Dietrich’s drag performance nor her kiss are mocked. The catcalls at the beginning of her performance are explicitly not a reaction to her gender presentation – per La Bessière, “If I remember correctly, this audience shows its usual discriminating kindness by receiving its newcomers rather unpleasantly” – and the audience’s boos quiet immediately once she begins to sing. Dietrich’s kiss is genuine and passionate, and the female audience member’s embarrassment reads as flustered, not outraged.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also talk about Private Tom Brown’s role in this performance. While the majority of his time on screen, Tom is the model of 1930s masculinity (not much of a reach for Gary Cooper), in this scene, he takes on a much softer role. He appears enamored with her performance not in spite of her masculine presentation, but because of it: Tom is the only member of the audience to leap to his feet in applause after her kiss, and he receives the flower she tosses to him with a near-religious reverence.

I find the sequence incredibly moving: two people, who, for the majority of this film, are confined to the expectations of femininity and masculinity, are allowed to enjoy a world much vaster and accommodating than the one the Hays Code prescribes. They become so real to me. I see myself in the woman’s bashful response to her first queer kiss, in Tom Brown’s standing ovation for butch performance, in Amy Jolly’s swaggering ease with which she dons her coat and tails.

Why should we care about access to pre-Code cinema? After all, it’s 2026; we’re far past that bygone era of media regulation when we were encouraged to self-censor depictions of justified revenge, villainous ministers of religious institutions, and “sex perversion.”

…Aren’t we?  

Even with physical preservation efforts, without the public domain, there’s no guarantee that films like Morocco will always be accessible to audiences. Historically, when progress has been made towards marginalized representation in media, the hammer of the censor is swift and heavy: the late 1920s and early 1930s saw increasing depictions of queerness in film, only for Hays to call for a ban of gay characters from the screen in response. 

When something belongs to everyone, it’s hard to make it vanish without someone noticing. The public domain takes stories like Morocco out of the control of copyright holders and places them in the hands of the people. It grants me the ability to watch, relate to, and share this scene with others who, like me, get to see their lives and the people they loved reflected in art almost 100 years old. 

To celebrate the public domain this year, go watch Morocco and many more incredible works of art on the Internet Archive, and think about what else we can preserve for the future.

THIS WEDNESDAY: Three Ways to Celebrate the Public Domain

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Join us THIS WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21 for three different ways to celebrate the creative works from 1930 and the sounds recordings from 1925 that have entered the public domain in the US:

10am PT – VIRTUAL party: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1977502652667

6pm PT – IN PERSON film screening & party at the Internet Archive: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1977503818153

7pm PT – LIVESTREAM film screening: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1980757251259

How Librarian Megan Lotts Turned 1 Trillion Web Pages into an 8-Page Zine

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How do you commemorate the preservation of 1 trillion web pages in a zine? That was Megan Lotts’ challenge when she was contacted by the Internet Archive last summer.

Lotts is an art librarian at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where she promotes creativity, play, and makerspaces through her teaching and research. She designs zines (short for magazine), which are self-published, handmade objects that are often copied and shared. It was through Lotts’ involvement with zines at the American Library Association (ALA) conference that she was asked by Internet Archive librarian Chris Freeland to create one for the Internet Archive’s October celebration.

For the project, Lotts collaborated with Louisa Cohen and Drew MacDonald at the Internet Archive on images and text to incorporate. Although an avid user of the Internet Archive, Lotts said making the zine prompted her to take a deep dive and discover all new material. 

“As a librarian, this is a space where you go for history,” she said of the Internet Archive. “I’m a kind of curious, reflective person, but there were collections that I came across that I didn’t know existed.”

The final product is an 8-page zine that Lotts has shared on the Internet Archive, along with a close-up view of the pages. It includes the Wayback Machine logo, icons of various collections, an old Polaroid photo of Internet Archive’s digital librarian, Brewster Kahle, next to a vintage computer.

The zine was printed and shared with attendees at the Oct. 22 Internet Archive party in San Francisco. Lotts took a week off from Rutgers to help unveil the zine at the festivities. Upon returning to Rutgers, she said it was fun to show students her work and explain the process. They were excited to hear about her experience, Lotts said, and what she learned behind the scenes at the headquarters.

“My students grew up with the Wayback Machine. They’ve used it since grade school,” said Lotts, 51, who remembers first accessing the Archive in college. “If you think about 1 trillion pages in less than 30 years, that’s outrageous. It’s preserving information for posterity.”

Zines need to be preserved, Lotts maintains, along with other art and cultural artifacts.

Librarian and creator Megan Lotts.

“When I give someone a zine, what I’m really hoping is that I’m giving you a moment,” Lotts said, “whether you recognize it or not, to hold this in your hands and get lost from the rest of the world. It’s just a tiny little book … I want people to look at it and think about it. That’s the beauty of the zine.”

Zines can be as elaborate as the one she produced for the Archive, she said, or as simple as creating something with a piece of paper, pen or pencil and an idea. “Those are things that most of us can access and everybody has a story,” said Lotts, who hopes the project inspires people to consider tapping into their creative side to make a zine.

“I’m noticing—as a scholar and as an educator—that people want to engage with the arts. They want to be creative,” said Lotts, who has degrees in fine arts, library science, painting and art history and teaches a class on play. “It’s really powerful for me to see students come alive and think about information and knowledge creation in a playful and exciting way.”

Lotts is the author of two books published by the American Library Association (ALA):  Advancing a Culture of Creativity in Libraries: Programming and Engagement (2021) and The Playful Library: Building Environments for Learning and Creativity (2024).

Check out her scholarship web page and website for more.

EveryLibrary Institute Joins the Our Future Memory Coalition

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The Our Future Memory movement continues to grow, with the EveryLibrary Institute (ELI) formally joining the global coalition and endorsing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online. ELI’s participation brings a powerful policy-focused perspective to the effort to ensure that libraries, archives, and museums retain the rights they need to fulfill their public mission in a digital world.

EveryLibrary Institute explained its reason for joining the Our Future Memory movement:

By joining the Our Future Memory coalition and endorsing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online, the EveryLibrary Institute is hoping to advance a broader conversation that reaches beyond copyright reform alone and asks deeper questions about ownership, stewardship, creativity, and the future of reading in a digital society. We believe that this conversation must include libraries and educators, but also independent booksellers, independent publishers, authors, technologists, policymakers, and readers themselves. The health of the creative economy and our democratic society depends on getting this right.

About the Statement

The Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online aims to safeguard the essential digital activities of libraries, archives, and museums (collectively referred to as “memory institutions”). It urges policymakers and communities to ensure these institutions retain the same rights and responsibilities online that they have historically held offline, including the rights to:

  1. Collect digital materials, including through digitization and lawful acquisition;
  2. Preserve digital works, including repair, backup, and reformatting for long-term access;
  3. Provide controlled access to digital collections for research and public use; and
  4. Cooperate across institutions by sharing and transferring digital collections to strengthen preservation and access.

Want to Learn More?

Interested libraries and memory institutions can learn more about the Our Future Memory coalition and Statement at a free, public webinar on Tuesday, January 27 at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Register at https://blog.archive.org/event/protect-our-future-memory-join-the-call-for-library-digital-rights/. 

The Chronicles of Cheifet

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The end of 2025 brought news of the passing of Stewart Cheifet, creator of Computer Chronicles, and Net Cafe, two shows about electronics and computers that are, depending on your personal history, critical pieces of your knowledge of Computers or a show you might never have heard of. Running on PBS stations throughout the country for years, these shows brought a sense of fun and curiousity to computer technology, business and related subjects. In many cases, these interviews are among the only easily-found references to the people and subjects being discussed.

There is an excellent obituary in the New York Times, but it should be also be remembered how much of a thread of collaboration existed over the decades, between Cheifet and the Internet Archive.

The most prominent exhibit of Stewart Cheifet’s collaboration are the Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe collections at the Internet Archive, where hundreds of episodes are freely playable and downloadable.

These programs, usually a half-hour in length, included different segments and presenters, although Cheifet was a constant. The format would range from news stories to on-set interviews with the creators, business owners, and users of various computer technologies. The show ran from 1983 to 2002, splitting off Net Cafe in the 1990s.

A notable aspect of these shows are the wild variety of subjects, many still relevant in the present day, being presented and discussed as they burst into the consciousness of comptuer users. Desktop Video Editing, Virtual Universities, Cyber Privacy all make appearances, as do terms long out of the lexicon, like Push Technology.

“I hold him in such high esteem,” says Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive. “He was always great work with, and had that fantastic voice.”

Brewster Kahle, interviewed on Net Cafe in 2001.

After being interviewed for Net Cafe about the plans for the Internet Archive, Brewster asked Stewart about the archive of episodes of Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe. Chiefet said he wished they were available. The Archive offered to host any digitized files, and the project began.

After landing a Hewlett Foundation Grant, the Computer Chronicles archive was digitized and put on the Internet Archive in collaboration with Rick Prelinger, who also had a collection of video and digitized film at the Archive.

In the era of streaming servies and Youtube, it is very easy to forget how rare and difficult large-format video files were to provide to the Internet at large, even into the early 2000s. Files would often be available only on FTP sites and the torrent protocol was extremely new. To be providing such files for a wide audience of these materials was a difficult prcoess.

By Brewster’s recollection, the shows have been re-encoded a half dozen times across the decades, from RealMedia to MPEG-1/MPEG-2, flash video. and currently in MPEG-4. (The original high file-size originals were kept through all these upgrades).

“Over all these decades, he was the real guy,” says Brewster. “This was a guy who was willing to put his creation on the Internet, for free. A guy who wasn’t just a journalist, or observer, but was trying to make the Internet go, and he came and worked with us to make us go.”

During his time with the Internet Archive, “Stewart worked with other organizations to bring items to the Internet Archive. Many were gummed up by contracts – he then offered Creative Commons licenses.” Support of Creative Commons has continued with Internet Archive uploads ever since.

The Re-Digitization

Standing as it had for almost 20 years, the Computer Chronicles collection was extremely popular, garnering hundreds of thousands of views along the episodes. However, there was one notable angle beyond its longevity – the oversights.

Small imperfections had existed across the hundreds of digitized episodes: Various episodes were missing, and some had missing tracks of sound.

A few years before he left California, Stewart Cheifet donated his collection of Computer Chronicles and related media from his personal collection to the Internet Archive, where they were transferred to Physical Storage. These included every tape digitized by the initial project, as well as other tapes that were unlabelled or mislabeled.

Meanwhile, another group of fans and enthusiasts had begun the process of creating a website to list every single known episode of Computer Chronicles and verify all the related data.

This group, the Computer Chronicles Archiving project, requested access to the stored physical tapes and began verifying them against the list, discovering that some tapes contained multiple episodes, or were in different formats from the initial digitizing run. Ultimately, they began re-digitizing episodes from the ground up, starting with missing episodes.

The results of the Computer Chronicles Re-Digitization project have been successful so far, with missing episodes restored for posterity, and improvements to some previous episodes as well.

Computer Chronicles: The Encore

With such wide availability, it was inevitable there would be a cultural reference or parody referencing Computer Chronices, and it came in the Adam Lisagor-produced Computer Show, where two hosts from the 1980s interview modern (2016) web celebrities. The gimmick was that the hosts didn’t understand any reference to computer technology past their own time, providing confused looks any time the interviewee referenced them.

Computer Show imitates many of the aesthetic aspects of Computer Chronicles.

As part of ongoing experimentations in access to visual media combined with automated transcription and subject searches, the GDELT project created a Computer Chronicles Visual Explorer in 2023.

There’s more projects and use to come – because of the open licensing, the episodes of Computer Chronicles on the Archive will be available for reference, research, and evidence of a time when computers and online life had an entirely other flavor. While Stewart Cheifet is no longer with us, his lifelong project of bringing computer technology and experience to a wide audience and his connections to so many who have formed the Computer and Web experience live on.

Welcome to the Public Domain in 2026

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Montage of materials entering the public domain in 2026, created by Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Celebrate the public domain with the Internet Archive in the following ways:

  • Register for our Public Domain Day celebrations on January 21 – both virtual and in-person.
  • Submit a short film to our Public Domain Film Remix contest. Deadline January 7, 2026 @11:59 PM Pacific.
  • Explore the works that have entered the public domain in 2026, below.

On January 1, 2026, we celebrate published works from 1930 and published sound recordings from 1925 entering the public domain! Their arrival marks another chapter in our shared cultural heritage: the freedom to breathe new life into overlooked works, remix enduring classics, and circulate the oddities we discover in thrift stores, family attics, and forgotten corners of the internet.

For the first time since the 1970s, works from a new decade have entered the public domain after their long copyright term. This milestone builds on the momentum that began when the public domain reopened in 2019. The works of 1930 reflect a world grappling with enormous change: the early years of the Great Depression, anxieties about banks and tariffs (sound familiar?), and a cultural landscape still humming with the last heartbeats of the 1920s.

The Jazz Age and flapper style persisted through Nancy Drew’s illustrations and Betty Boop’s design; Buster Keaton’s first talkie signaled the twilight of the silent era; and the Gershwins continued to shake-up musical culture with “I Got Rhythm” and “Embraceable You”. The Interwar period left its mark, too—the first filmed adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front won Best Picture. Audiences sought escapism in the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, in 19 new Disney cartoons, and in the gender-bending glamour of the pre-Hays Code film Morocco.

Culture was everywhere—and now, it belongs to everyone.

Musical Compositions

1930 saw the introduction of many standards into the Great American Songbook including the wistful “Dream A Little Dream of Me”, “Georgia on My Mind”, and “It Happened in Monterey”. The latter of those songs being a cultural curiosity as the spelling reflects the California city while the song is about the Mexican city. Hoagy Charmichael’s loving refrain for the state of Georgia with Georgia on My Mind would become the state’s official song in 1979. 

Even inspiration for later 20th Century works bubbled up with “Beyond the Blue Horizon” which would serve as inspiration for the original Star Trek theme. At the Internet Archive the song reminds us of the blinking blue lights that help to power the 1 Trillion webpages saved.

Check out this list of more musical compositions from the year.

Literature

If we thought that detectives had a field day in 1929 then we just hadn’t seen what 1930 had to offer yet. Miss Marple, Nancy Drew, Harriet Vane, and Sam Spade all featured in iconic works of the year respectively: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie, The Secret of the Old Clock, Strong Poison, and the published novel edition of The Maltese Falcon. Nancy Drew appeared in four different stories this year giving readers and creatives plenty of stories and mysteries to dig into. But be careful and make sure you’re reading the original editions from 1930 and not the rewrites from the late 1950s. Luckily the Archive has the 1930 editions ready for you here in our collections!

While detective fiction dominated we also got bold works from other authors including As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner which blends multiple perspectives and bold narrative experimentation to chronicle a family’s turbulent journey to honor their mother’s final request. Groundwork was also laid for another Best Picture winner with Edna Farber’s Cimarron. Children had works to entertain themselves with Dick and Jane’s introduction in Elson Basic Readers and a 1930 retelling of the folktale, The Little Engine That Could.

Dive into Archive’s literary collection to unearth more classics from 1930.

Film

A favorite film of this author is the King of Jazz, a stunning Technicolor musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, and elaborate song and dance numbers. 

It wasn’t the only musical of the year as the Marx Brothers adapted their stage show Animal Crackers to the big screen in a film of the same name. Their comedic antics would absurdly riff on the culture of the time with Groucho directly parodying a monologue from Eugene O’Neill’s 1928 play, Strange Interlude.

While past the heyday of his filmic output, Buster Keaton was still on the scene with his first talkie, Free and Easy, entering the public domain this year. If you’ve never heard his voice before then it might surprise you! Another iconic comedy is Soup to Nuts, a vehicle for Rube Goldberg to share crazy contraptions on screen. It was also the debut of actors that would form The Three Stooges group a few years later.

In another reminder of how copyright expires on a yearly basis we’re talking about All Quiet on the Western Front for the third year in a row, but this time as the adaptation that won the 3rd Academy Award for Best Picture. The film is a sobering reminder and depiction of the horrors of war, and showcased how audiences in 1930 were still reeling from the first World War. It is also a very engaging and well rounded film that is still great cinema nearly 100 years later.

Even more icons made headway in 1930 with Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!, John Wayne’s first leading role in The Big Trail, and Greta Garbo’s moving performance in Anna Christie.

Check out more films from the year here:

Our film remix contest is ongoing until January 7, 2026, so please upload your submissions! Read more here.

Comics and Cartoons

Only a year removed from the 1920s, culture didn’t change overnight. Debuting on September 8, 1930, the Blondie comic strip by Chic Young was steeped in flapper style. Originally named Blondie Boopadoop, she drew on the singing persona of Helen Kane—who also inspired aspects of Betty Boop. For more on Betty Boop, read Jennifer Jenkins’ write-up at Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Mickey Mouse expanded from the screen to the page with 303 daily comic strips, sending him on western adventures, robber-chasing escapades, and more.

In 2026, we now have another 19 Disney shorts (9 Mickey, 10 Silly Symphonies) to help fill out this creative world. The Silly Symphonies rounded out their celebration of the seasons by following up 1929’s Springtime with Summer, Autumn, and Winter.

Meanwhile, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit—Mickey’s older brother—continued his prolific output even after Disney lost the rights to him in 1928. Under Walter Lantz, Oswald starred in 24 shorts this year, nearly 2.5 times Mickey’s total. Two of these, My Pal Paul and Africa, cross-promoted the film King of Jazz, proving that cinematic tie-ins have long been part of studio strategy.

Recap

The arrival of these works into the public domain is a reminder of our shared cultural heritage—of the stories, sounds, and images that shaped earlier generations and now become fair game for creative reuse. Many of these works have already been reimagined under copyright: Nancy Drew’s rewrites, the many adaptations of All Quiet on the Western Front, Mickey Mouse’s leap into comics, and more.

Now, in 2026, these works pass into a space where everyone can study them, remix them, preserve them, and carry them forward.

The public domain belongs to all of us. Let’s explore it together.

Additional resources

Tintin, The Wayback Machine, and The Public Domain

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What do a Belgian boy reporter, a forgotten 2008 webpage, and the Wayback Machine have in common? They all played a role in uncovering Tintin the Belgian detective’s earliest adventures as part of Public Domain Day 2025. 

Intellectual Property rights lawyer Aaron Moss summarizes that the earliest 1929 Tintin stories became part of the U.S. public domain in 2025, while copyright continues elsewhere. Since Tintin was not published in the English language in 1929, those wanting to utilize the original stories must return to the original French-language publication. But when those sources are nearly 100 years old and from a different country, that makes tracking them down difficult.  Even the best methods face unforeseen limitations when materials go out of print, become costly, or when websites go offline and inaccessible.

Luckily, we live in the 21st-Century with the connective power of the internet. Instead of traveling to Europe and searching in an archive to find original copies of Le Petit Vingtième, the initial children’s periodical that Tintin was published in, we can go online.

Even with the internet’s advantages, trying to find materials from that original 1929 publication proved to be challenging. Most searches for the initial Tintin story, In the Land of the Soviets, led me to republications with story alterations, later translated versions, or subsequent stories from beyond 1929. Yet, as each door kept closing, a window opened when reviewing the Le Petit Vingtième Wikipedia page. Buried in the description of the 1934 cover featured on the page was a link to a webpage from 2008. While the link was still on the page, it had rotted, now leading only to a dead page. Fortunately, we have the Wayback Machine.

The first Tintin comic

When plugging the rotted link into the Wayback Machine, I found an archived fan Tintin site. From that single archived link, my world of Tintin was blown wide open. Utilizing the Calendar feature of the Wayback Machine, I was able to navigate to a 2012 archive of the original 1929 comic strip. There were Tintin and Snowy in their original French appearance, along with the ensuing run of this initial tale. What had been obscure and abstract in its public domain status was now tangible and accessible thanks to the Wayback Machine.

The ability to locate the original Tintin stories in such an accessible way would not be possible without the Wayback Machine. The idea of 1 trillion web pages archived can be overwhelming in the abstract, but stories like this one remind us that the Wayback Machine is a portal to a living archive—enriching knowledge, culture, and access beyond the average lifespan of a link on the live web. The Wayback Machine supports and encourages creativity and reuse, and it feeds our common knowledge and cultural heritage.

This post is published with a CC0 license, dedicating it to the public domain.

Top News Stories About the Internet Archive: 2025

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CNN
The New Yorker
The New York Times
KQED
Scientific American
Ars Technica
BBC News
NPR
IEEE Spectrum

In 2025, a global conversation emerged about memory, power and who controls the historical record. As governments deleted web pages, platforms broke links, and public data quietly (and not so quietly) disappeared, journalists around the world turned to the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine to understand what was being lost, what could still be saved, and why preservation matters more than ever. From investigations in The New Yorker and The New York Times to video features from the BBC and CNN, these stories capture how the fight to preserve the web became one of the defining information battles of the year.

Full list: https://archive.org/about/news-stories/search?mentions-search=2025 (1,700+ for 2025)

Top News Stories About the Internet Archive: 2025

Top News Stories Referencing Wayback Machine / Internet Archive: 2025