We’re thrilled to unveil the creativity of our top three winners and three 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.
Watch the winning entries & honorable mentions below. Renowned film archivist Rick Prelinger returned to lead the jury, comprised of film professionals and enthusiasts including Simone Elias, Lara Gabrielle, BZ Petroff, and Theo Unkrich, offering insightful commentary on each selection and its standout qualities.
First Place: “When I Leave the World Behind” by Queline Meadows
From Rick: The jury was deeply impressed by Queline Meadows’s inspired mix of movies, images, music and text woven into a subtle and emotionally affecting video expressing a strong sense of nostalgia and the irretrievable passage of time.
Second Place: “The Archive Boogie” by Samantha Close
1929 was a great year for the movies! Filmmaker Samantha Close expresses both the breadth of 1929’s production and the eternal bounty of the public domain, using images from 1929’s films and public domain images from elsewhere and elsewhen.
Third Place: “THE SITUATIONSHIP” by Samara Meyer
Meyer’s crowdpleasing film features the daring, dazzling “It Girl,” Clara Bow, who lights up the screen in more ways than one in this Sapphic love story.
Honorable Mention – History: “Moving Pictures Aren’t What They Used to Be” by Jeremy Floyd
Jeremy Floyd’s enjoyable piece pays tribute to an uninhibited period of filmmaking — Hollywood before the passage of the restrictive Production Code, when movies were filled with roguish suggestion and undisguised violence.
Honorable Mention – Home Movies: “Hoffman’s Honeymoon” by William Webb
Of all film genres, home movies are the most numerous yet the least seen and known. Webb’s engaging video brings them into the foreground, adding voices from dramatic films in the public domain, to build a goofy but endearing narrative.
Honorable Mention – Live Action: “The Wayback Machine” by DIEGO DIAZ & CAN SARK
Diaz and Sark’s film is an audacious and yes, dopey exploration of the essential greatness of Internet Archive and the dread near-infinity of copyright.
On January 22, hundreds of people from all over the world gathered together for Singin’ in the Public Domain, a virtual celebration of the works that moved into the public domain in 2025. The event was co-hosted by Internet Archive and Library Futures.
Watch:
Speakers include (in order of appearance):
Natalia Paruz (The Saw Lady), musician
Lila Bailey, Internet Archive
Jennie Rose Halperin, Internet Archive
Sean Dudley, Internet Archive
Jennifer Jenkins, Center for the Study of the Public Domain
Vivian Li, Innovator in Residence, Library of Congress
Tim Findlen (Roochie Toochie and the Ragtime Shepherd Kings), musician
Kathleen DeLaurenti, Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University’s Arthur Friedheim Music Library
Colin Hancock (The Joymakers), musician
Ayun Halliday, Necromancers of the Public Domain
Simon Close, WYNC & Public Song Project
Dorothy Berry, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Lights, camera, action! It’s time to roll out the red carpet and celebrate Public Domain Day, Oscar-style!
On Wednesday, we’re honoring all the legendary works that have entered the public domain in 2025. And what better way to do it than with a glamorous, Hollywood-inspired twist?
Public Domain Day Celebration at the Internet Archive ⏰ 6pm – 10pm 📍 Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco 🎟️ $15 – REGISTER NOW. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
This year, we’re honoring 1929 — the year of the very first Academy Awards, held at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, CA. So put on your finest attire and get ready for an Oscar Award winning evening.
Sip on a classic French 75 or an Old-Fashioned as we savor the final moments of the Roaring Twenties.
Lecture by George Evelyn on Disney’s Silly Symphonies – “The Skeleton Dance” Join us for an insightful lecture by Animation Director George Evelyn as he explores Disney’s groundbreaking 1929 short, The Skeleton Dance, the first installment of the iconic Silly Symphonies series. Discover how this eerie, yet charming animation set the stage for the whimsical, music-driven cartoons we know and love today!
Screening of Our Film Mash-Up Winners Stick around for the Film Mash-Up competition winners, showcasing creative, mind-blowing reinterpretations of classic public domain works. From quirky edits to unique remixes, you won’t want to miss these inventive new takes on timeless films!
Don’t miss this dazzling night of history, cinema, and celebration!
If you’re unable to attend in person, we will also be hosting a virtual celebration on January 22nd at 10am PT.
Public Domain Day Celebration at the Internet Archive ⏰ 6pm – 10pm 📍 Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco 🎟️ $15 – REGISTER NOW. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Disney’s classic animated short, “The Skeleton Dance,” is now in the public domain (Duke Law). Why is that such a big deal? Watch as Internet Archive’s Sean Dudley, a researcher specializing in the public domain, takes viewers on a tour of what makes “The Skeleton Dance” special, and why the film being open to remix and reuse is important for creators.
Hi, my name is Sean, and I’m a researcher with the Internet Archive. One of the most iconic pieces to become public domain this year was 1929’s “The Skeleton Dance.”
This Disney short is revolutionary.
Its synchronization of music and animation still holds up. Primarily animated by Ub Iwerks, the short feature skeletons turning into Lovecraftian monsters and getting down to some really cool beats.
This was in no small part thanks to Carl Stalling, who would later become famous for doing a lot of Looney Tunes music. And really being accented by the “Mickey Mouseing” effect of timing the animation to the music.
The beauty of this short is that it’s already building on the public domain with the music that it’s utilizing and taking inspiration from previous artists like Thomas Rowlandson for the skeleton designs.
And now because it’s public domain, you are able to remix, reuse, or do whatever you want with it. Because it’s ours. It belongs to all of us.
On January 1, 2025, creative works from 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 will enter the public domain in the US.
1929 marked the last gasp of the roaring 20s and ushered in the Great Depression, a major economic crisis that would span the next 12 years. One thing we can see nearly a century later is that, in good times and bad, human creativity, knowledge, and culture persist. That year, Virginia Woolfe published her groundbreaking essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” advocating for female freedom of expression. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened in New York City, featuring the works of Van Gough, Cezanne, and Gauguin. Major movie studios put out not one, but two musicals starring all Black casts: “Halleluja” and “Hearts of Dixie.” Disney continued the Mickey Mouse trend with a dozen new animated shorts. And of course famous songs like “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “Singin’ in the Rain” topped the charts.
Celebrate the public domain with us:
1. Creators: Enter the Public Domain Film Remix Contest
We invite filmmakers and artists of all skill levels to celebrate the public domain by creating and uploading 2–3 minute short films to the Internet Archive! Top entries will be awarded prizes up to $1,500. Contest details.
2. Virtual Celebration: January 22nd @ 10am PT
Join us on January 22 to get “that glorious feeling” of singin’ in the public domain! We’ll have an amazing virtual lineup of academics, librarians, musicians, artists and advocates coming together to celebrate this new class of works being free for everyone to enjoy. Register now!
3. In-Person Celebration: January 22nd @ 6pm PT
Please join us at our headquarters in San Francisco for a Celebration of the Public Domain! This year, we’re honoring 1929 — the year of the very first Academy Awards, held at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, CA. Put on your finest attire and get ready for an award-worthy evening. Register now!
4. Explore the public domain
Check out our recent post for links to the newly opened public domain resources at the Internet Archive.
Additional resources
Learn more about what’s moving into the public domain in 2025 from Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
As the Grateful Dead are honored at the Kennedy Center Honors broadcast on Sunday (airing December 22 at 8:30pm ET on CBS & streaming), we’re celebrating their legacy with a look at the top ten most popular recordings in the Internet Archive’s Grateful Dead collection. Home to over 17,000 live recordings spanning decades of performances, this collection reflects the band’s rich history, their loyal taper community, and the boundless creativity of their legendary shows. From mesmerizing jams to unforgettable setlists, these recordings represent the enduring magic of the Dead—and the timeless connection between the band and their fans. Listen in and rediscover the music that has kept the Grateful Dead’s spirit alive for generations:
Top Ten Grateful Dead Live Recordings at the Internet Archive
Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that the legendary concert at Barton Hall, Cornell University, on May 8, 1977 appears twice on the list. The collection often features multiple recordings of the same show by different tapers from different vantage points in the crowd. A note on #10 indicates that recording was made “10 Feet From Stage=Great Instrement [sic] Pickup.”
In 2024, the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance brought together an array of authors, scholars and thought leaders to explore critical issues at the intersection of technology, culture and information science. From the labor implications of artificial intelligence in Joanne McNeil’s Wrong Way to the evolving role of fair use in Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi’s landmark publication, Reclaiming Fair Use, these conversations covered topics shaping our information-enabled future. Here are highlights from the year’s events, offering session recordings for anyone eager to revisit—or discover for the first time—the compelling ideas shared by these influential voices.
February 29: Wrong Way
Author Joanne McNeil in conversation with author Sarah Jaffe.
McNeil & Jaffe discuss the labor implications of artificial intelligence for our first book talk about a work of fiction.
For years, Teresa has passed from one job to the next, settling into long stretches of time, struggling to build her career in any field or unstick herself from an endless cycle of labor. The dreaded move from one gig to another is starting to feel unbearable. When a recruiter connects her with a contract position at AllOver, it appears to check all her prerequisites for a “good” job. It’s a fintech corporation with progressive hiring policies and a social justice-minded mission statement. Their new service for premium members: a functional fleet of driverless cars. The future of transportation. As her new-hire orientation reveals, the distance between AllOver’s claims and its actions is wide, but the lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is enough to keep Teresa driving forward.
Author and game designer Jordan Mechner in conversation with historian Chris Kohler.
Jordan Mechner (creator of “Prince of Persia”) shares his story as a pioneer in the fast-growing video game industry from the 1980s to today, and how his family’s back story as refugees from war-torn Europe led to his own multifaceted 4-decade creative career. Interweaving of past and present, family transmission, exile and renewal are at the heart of his award-winning graphic novel “Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family.”
Authors Andrea I. Copland and Kathleen DeLaurenti in conversation with musician and educator Kyoko Kitamura, facilitated by music librarian Matthew Vest.
Based on coursework developed at the Peabody Conservatory, Unlocking the Digital Age: The Musician’s Guide to Research, Copyright, and Publishing by Andrea I. Copland and Kathleen DeLaurenti serves as a crucial resource for early career musicians navigating the complexities of the digital era. This guide bridges the gap between creative practice and scholarly research, empowering musicians to confidently share and protect their work as they expand their performing lives beyond the concert stage as citizen artists. It offers a plain language resource that helps early career musicians see where creative practice and creative research intersect and how to traverse information systems to share their work. As professional musicians and researchers, the authors’ experiences on stage and in academia makes this guide an indispensable tool for musicians aiming to thrive in the digital landscape.
Authors Aram Sinnreich & Jesse Gilbert in conversation with tech scholar Laura Denardis.
In The Secret Life of Data, Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert explore the many unpredictable, and often surprising, ways in which data surveillance, AI, and the constant presence of algorithms impact our culture and society in the age of global networks. The authors build on this basic premise: no matter what form data takes, and what purpose we think it’s being used for, data will always have a secret life. How this data will be used, by other people in other times and places, has profound implications for every aspect of our lives—from our intimate relationships to our professional lives to our political systems.
Author Dan Sinykin in conversation with humanities scholar Ted Underwood.
Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author. Giving an inside look at the industry’s daily routines, personal dramas, and institutional crises, he reveals how conglomeration has shaped what kinds of books and writers are published. Sinykin examines four different sectors of the publishing industry: mass-market books by brand-name authors like Danielle Steel; trade publishers that encouraged genre elements in literary fiction; nonprofits such as Graywolf that aspired to protect literature from market pressures; and the distinctive niche of employee-owned W. W. Norton. He emphasizes how women and people of color navigated shifts in publishing, arguing that writers such as Toni Morrison allegorized their experiences in their fiction.
Author Nathan Schneider in conversation with author Lilly Irani.
When was the last time you participated in an election for a Facebook group or sat on a jury for a dispute in a subreddit? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences of this arrangement matter far beyond online spaces themselves, as feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian tendencies among politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Using media archaeology, political theory, and participant observation, Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before.
Authors & copyright scholars Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi in conversation with Dave Hansen, executive director of Authors Alliance.
In the increasingly complex and combative arena of copyright in the digital age, record companies sue college students over peer-to-peer music sharing, YouTube removes home movies because of a song playing in the background, and filmmakers are denied a distribution deal when a permissions i proves undottable. Analyzing the dampening effect that copyright law can have on scholarship and creativity, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi urge us to embrace in response a principle embedded in copyright law itself—fair use.
Author Barbara McQuade in conversation with Sarah Lamdan of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation—the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth—and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It’s endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility.
In Attack from Within, legal scholar and analyst Barbara McQuade, shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it.
Author James Boyle in conversation with Kate Darling of the MIT Media Lab.
Chatbots like ChatGPT have challenged human exceptionalism: we are no longer the only beings capable of generating language and ideas fluently. But is ChatGPT conscious? Or is it merely engaging in sophisticated mimicry? And what happens in the future if the claims to consciousness are more credible? In The Line, James Boyle explores what these changes might do to our concept of personhood, to “the line” we believe separates our species from the rest of the world, but also separates “persons” with legal rights from objects.
Authors Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland and Katie Livingston in a roundtable discussion.
In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk.
We invite filmmakers and artists of all skill levels to celebrate Public Domain Day on January 22, 2025, by creating and uploading 2–3 minute short films to the Internet Archive!
This contest offers a chance to explore and reimagine the creative treasures entering the public domain, including works from 1929—classic literature, silent films, music, and art. Participants are encouraged to use materials from the Internet Archive’s collections to craft unique films that breathe new life into these cultural gems.
Top entries will be awarded prizes up to $1,500, with winners announced during our in-person Public Domain Day Celebration on January 22, 2025, at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco. All submissions will be featured in a special Public Domain Day Collection on archive.org and highlighted in a January 2025 blog post.
Join us in this creative celebration of cultural heritage and timeless art!
Here are a few examples of some of the materials that will become public domain on January 1, 2025:
Periodicals!Black Thursday – October 24, 1929: The stock market experienced a massive drop, with panic selling beginning. Black Monday – October 28, 1929: The market fell even more sharply, accelerating the crisis. Black Tuesday – October 29, 1929: The Great Depression begins.
Make a 2–3 minute movie using at least one work published in 1929 that will become Public Domain on January 1, 2025. This could be a poem, book, film, musical composition, painting, photograph or any other work that will become Public Domain next year. The more different PD materials you use, the better!
Note: If you have a resource from 1929 that is not available on archive.org, you may upload it and then use it in your submission. (Here is how to do that).
Your submission must have a soundtrack. It can be your own voiceover or performance of a public domain musical composition, or you may use public domain or CC0 sound recordings from sources like Openverse and the Free Music Archive.
Note: Sound recordings have special status under Copyright Law, so it’s important to note that while musical compositions from 1929 will be entering the public domain, the sound recordings of those works are not. Sound recordings published in 1924 will enter the public domain.
Mix and Mash content however you like, but note that ALL of your sources must be from the public domain. They do not all have to be from 1929. Remember, U.S. government works are public domain no matter when they are published. So feel free to use those NASA images! You may include your own original work if you put a CC0 license on it.
Add a personal touch, make it yours!
Keep the videos light hearted and fun! (It is a celebration after all!)
Submission Deadline
All submissions must be in by Midnight, January 17, 2025 (PST)
Link all your sourced materials from 1929 in the upload description
Prizes
1st prize: $1500
2nd prize: $1000
3rd prize: $500
Judges will be looking for videos that are fun, interesting and use public domain materials, especially those from 1929. They will be shown at the in-person Public Domain Day party in San Francisco and should highlight the value of having cultural materials that can be reused, remixed, and re-contextualized for a new day. Winners’ pieces will be purchased with the prize money, and viewable on the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons license.
Amir Saber Esfahani (Director of Special Arts Projects, Internet Archive)
Rick Prelinger (Board Member, Internet Archive, Founder, Prelinger Archives)
BZ Petroff (Director of Admin & HR, Internet Archive)
The Grateful Dead Collection, part of the Live Music Archive, features more than 17,000 concert recordings spanning decades of the band’s live shows. The collection is a result of the Grateful Dead’s longstanding collaboration with their fans and the taper community, supporting non-commercial recording and sharing of music taped at their shows, creating an unparalleled archive of live music.
What’s the most popular Grateful Dead recording in the collection? No surprise to Dead fans, the legendary concert at Barton Hall, Cornell University, on May 8, 1977, has the most views. Listen below or here.
Whether you’re reliving a classic show or discovering their music for the first time, explore the Grateful Dead Collection to experience the sound and spirit of a band that continues to inspire. 🌹💀
While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit’s opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review. We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers (AAP) agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers’ requests.
We thank the many readers, authors and publishers who have stood with us throughout this fight. Together, we will continue to advocate for a future where libraries can purchase, own, lend and preserve digital books.
