Lights, camera, preservation! On a star-studded evening at the Internet Archive, we rolled out the red carpet to honor the creative works from 1929 and the sound recordings from 1924 that entered the public domain in 2025. And what better way to celebrate than with a glamorous, Oscar-inspired soirée?
Guests arrived in true 1920s fashion, riding in a vintage convertible before stepping onto the red carpet, where they were met by the spirited Raining Chainsaws street theater troupe, who transformed into a fleet of eager, old-time paparazzi—flashing cameras, barking questions, and adding a touch of whimsy and Hollywood magic to the night.
📸 Check out photos from the red carpet!
Inside the Internet Archive, attendees sipped on French 75s and Old-Fashioneds, classic cocktails that transported us back to the final, glittering moments of the Roaring Twenties. The theme of the night? 1929—the year of the very first Academy Awards—and we honored this cinematic milestone with an evening of film, history, and remixing of the past.
🎞 Lecture by George Evelyn on Disney’s The Skeleton Dance Animation historian George Evelyn enlightened the audience with a viewing of The Skeleton Dance, the first of Disney’s Silly Symphonies. With its pioneering use of synchronized sound and animation, the 1929 short was a perfect reminder of how creativity from the past continues to shape the present.
🎬 Public Domain Film Remix Contest Screening What happens when today’s creators remix yesterday’s masterpieces? Our Public Domain Film Remix Contest showcased the most inventive reinterpretations of public domain classics, where old Hollywood met modern storytelling in unexpected and thrilling ways. View all the winners, honorable mentions and submissions from this year’s contest.
👀 Watch the livestream of the night’s festivities
As the evening came to a close, guests toasted to the future of open culture, celebrating the power of preservation, creativity, and the public domain. Thank you to everyone who joined us for this dazzling night of history, cinema, and community!
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
The following guest post from curator and amateur radio enthusiast Kay Savetz is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
A selection of cassette tapes from the “Ham Radio & More” radio show digitized by DLARC.
Amateur Radio has been a hobby for well over 100 years. For as long as there has been an understanding of electricity and radio waves, people have been experimenting with these technologies and advancing the state of the art. As a result, the world has moved from wired telegraphy to tube radios to telephones—fast forward a century—to GPS and high-speed digital communication devices that fit in your pocket.
Advances made by amateur radio experimenters have propelled the work of NASA, satellites, television, the internet, and every communications company in existence today. People fiddling with radios have pushed forward technological advances the world around, time and time again.
And yet, the people making these efforts, doing these feats, aren’t always the best at documenting and preserving their work for the future. That’s where Internet Archive comes in.
I’m the curator of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. DLARC is a project of the Internet Archive, and my job is to find and preserve this rich history of radio and communications. DLARC collects resources related to amateur radio, satellite communications, television, shortwave radio, pirate radio, experimental communications, and related communications.
In the two years since the project launched, DLARC has preserved thousands of magazines and journals, manuals, product catalogs, radio programs, and conference proceedings. These materials were scattered worldwide, often inaccessible and in obsolete formats. We’ve digitized material that was on paper, cassette tape, reel-to-reel tape, CD-ROMs, DVDs. We’ve digitized video from 16mm film, VHS, U-Matic, Betacam and even more obscure video formats.
We’ve built a collection of more than 140,000 items and made them available to the world. Researchers, academics, and hobbyists use the library to learn from the rich history of this 100-year-old hobby.
Learn more about DLARC
One reason this preservation is necessary is that the people creating history don’t always realize at the time that they’re creating history. In 1977, the creators of Amateur Radio Newsline—a weekly audio news bulletin—probably didn’t realize that their project would still be going on in 2024, 47 years later. And for all of their amazing work, if they had realized they were documenting history, they might have made more effort to save those recordings: the first 20 years of their work are missing. (DLARC has found some recordings from 1996, then most of them since 2012.)
Sometimes creators do recognize the importance of their effort. For more than six years, Len Winkler hosted Ham Radio & More, a radio show about amateur radio. Winker recorded every episode on cassette tape and managed to digitize many of the shows himself. However, the process of digitizing hundreds of episodes is tedious and he wasn’t able to complete it. With his approval, DLARC stepped in to finish the job. They’re all online now, more than 300 episodes including interviews with many notable names in the radio community.
There have been other huge successes: the entire 43-year run of 73 Magazine is digitized and online thanks to the publisher, Wayne Green, who donated the collection to Internet Archive before his death. Most issues of The W5YI Report, a ham radio newsletter that was published for 25 years, are online as well.
Attempting to preserve material years, or sometimes decades, after the fact makes systematic preservation nearly impossible. For every success story of content saved and archived, there is a heartbreaking story of loss. When amateur radio enthusiasts die, their media collections are often disposed of by survivors who don’t have any connection to amateur radio. File cabinets and bookcases full of (sometimes irreplaceable) materials are emptied into recycle bins.
Another challenge to preservation and access is membership organizations that keep their material behind paywalls. They sometimes prevent any of their information from being lent in an online library, which it is their right to do. However while they actively thwart efforts at preservation, it remains unclear whether those groups are adequately preserving their own history.
Some material is preserved intentionally, but a good amount was saved purely by accident. The material we recover and digitize has come from attics and basements, from libraries discarding obsolete material, from long-forgotten FTP sites, from scratched CD-ROMs, and from the estates of people who have passed.
So we float where the radio waves take us, trying to preserve the past as much as possible, while encouraging today’s content creators to consider how to make their material accessible to future generations.
Image credit: Montage of materials moving into the public domain in 2025. Duke Law 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 22 – both virtual and in-person.
Submit a short film to our Public Domain Film Remix contest.
Explore the works that have entered the public domain in 2025, below.
On January 1, 2025, we celebrate published works from 1929 and published sound recordings from 1924 entering the public domain! The passage of these works into the public domain celebrates our shared cultural heritage. The ability to breathe new life into long forgotten works, remix the most popular and enduring works of the time, and to better circulate the oddities we find in thrift stores, attics, and on random pockets of the internet are now freely available for us all.
While not at the same blockbuster level as 2024 with Steamboat Willie’s passage into the public domain, works from 1929 still inhabit strong cultural significance today. The works of 1929 continue to capture the Lost Generation’s voice, the rise of sound film, and the emerging modern moment of the 1920s.
Musical Compositions
Show tunes and Jazz dominated the year with many standards that we remember today first being published. While best known for the 1952 film of the same name, Singin’ in the Rain was first published in 1929 and serves as the inspiration for our remix contest this year. George Gershwin also officially published (and copyrighted) his suite An American in Paris following a premiere in late 1928.
Below is sheet music for some popular compositions of the time.
While not a towering work of literature, the first set of comic strips featuring Popeye also are joining the public domain. Popeye first made an appearance in Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929. Initially just a side character for an adventure arc featuring gambling and sailing, Popeye rose quickly to fame. By February 4, 1931 the Thimble Theatre would feature a subtitle, Starring Popeye, before being renamed just Popeye later on.
Below is a further selection of works from the year:
Dive into Archive’s literary collection to unearth more classics from 1929.
Films
Last year Mickey Mouse made a splash with Steamboat Willie cruising into the public domain. This year TWELVEmore Mickey shorts join to flesh out the notable events of Mickey’s young career. He speaks his first words in The Karnival Kid, he wears gloves for the first time in The Opry House, and Ub Iwerks leaves the studio at year’s end with Wild Waves. Disney animation also kickstarted their Silly Symphonies series with the haunting tales The Skeleton Dance and Hell’s Bells.
In 1929, if your film wanted to have any attention it needed sound. Musical films were everywhere with The Broadway Melodywinning the second ever Best Picture award at the Oscars, The Hollywood Revue introducing the world to “Singin’ in the Rain”, and the Marx Brothers making their big screen debut with The Cocoanuts.
Below is a list of more significant films from the year:
Our film remix contest is ongoing until January 17, 2025, so please upload your submissions! Read more here.
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.
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.”
The Wayback Machine, Archive.org, Archive-it.org, and OpenLibrary.org came up in stages over the week after cyberattacks with some of the contributor features coming up over the last couple of weeks. A few to go. Much of the development during this time has been focused on securing the services so they can still run while attacks continue.
The Internet Archive is adapting to a more hostile world, where DDOS attacks are recurring periodically (such as yesterday and today), and more severe attacks might happen. Our response has been to harden our services and learn from friends. This note is to share some high level findings, without being so detailed as to help those that are still attacking archive.org.
By tightening firewall technologies, we have changed how data flows through our systems to improve monitoring and control. The downside is these upgrades have forced changes to software, some of it quite old.
The bright side is this is forcing upgrades that we have long planned or hoped for. We are greatly helped by the free and open source community’s improving tools that can be used by large corporations as well as non-profit libraries because they are freely available.
Also, some commercial companies have offered assistance that would generally be prohibitively expensive. We are grateful for the support.
Where the Internet Archive has always focused on building collections and preserving them, we have been starkly reminded how important reliable access is to researchers, journalists, and readers. This is leading us to install technical defenses and increase staff to improve service availability.
Libraries in general, and the Internet Archive in specific, have been under attack for many years now. For us it started with the book publishers suing (about lending books), and now the recording industry (about 78rpm records), which is a drain on our staff and financial resources. Now recurring DDOS attacks distract us from the goals of preservation and access to our digital heritage.
We don’t know why these attacks have started recently and if they are coordinated, but we are building defenses.
We are grateful for the support from our patrons, through social media, through donations, and through offers of help, which frankly, makes it worthwhile to keep building a library for all of us.
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security.
The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
The Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning, and national library crawls have resumed, as well as email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications. Our team is working around the clock across time zones to bring other services back online. In coming days more services will resume, some starting in read-only mode as full restoration will take more time.
We’re taking a cautious, deliberate approach to rebuild and strengthen our defenses. Our priority is ensuring the Internet Archive comes online stronger and more secure.
The following guest post from audio preservation expert George Blood is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.
Thomas Edison produces the first machine that can record and playback sound in 1877. The flat disc is first patented in 1888. The concept is very simple: a sound wave is captured on the record as a physical wave in the disc, most often shellac (the shell of the lac beetle). Most discs spin at approximately 78 rpm, hence the name 78s. Other speeds, such as 80, 90 and 100 rpm are not uncommon. In addition to speed, the equalization and stylus size varies – either to improve the sound or to dodge someone else’s patent. In the 1950s they slowly give way to the LP or microgroove record, though in some parts of the world they remain common well into the 1960s.
Why is it important to preserve 78rpm discs?
The cultural record of the 20th century is different from all other periods of human history by the presence of audiovisual recordings. Prior to 1877, there was no way to record the sound of a nursery rhyme being read at bedtime, a musical or theatrical performance, or the world around us. During the ensuing 147 years, formats came and went as technology and preferences changed. Yet for nearly half that time, 78rpm discs were the way we learned about each other and entertained the world. It was a time when the world became a much smaller place. The invention of the automobile and the airplane, the expansion of the railroads, the telephone and radio, to the dawn of the space age, 78s were there. Through 78s, we could hear traditional music from Hawaii long before it was a state. American popular music – jazz, fox trot, big bands, even the Beatles – spread out across the globe, well ahead of Hollywood, and long before television. A thousand people might attend a concert, a theater performance, a speech, or a dramatic reading by Charles Dickens. With the 78, it became possible for those experiences to be shared and repeated, and spread far and wide, not once and done.
The period of 78s doesn’t just parallel other historical developments. The sounds on 78s document cultural norms, performance practices, tastes, and the interests of people who, after centuries of drudgery and lives spent in the fields and hard labor, finally had free time. My mother liked to remind me that nothing tells you more about a person than what makes them laugh. The comedy routines and lyrics give us a window into a time when groups of people were preyed upon, disparaged, and disrespected in stereotypes and bigotry, which shines a mirror on how we can still do better to our fellow beings. We hear the buoyant sounds of the roaring ‘20s, a happy, hopeful time, of liberation and greed. Music borne of the heavy hand of oppression and poverty that conveys gospel, blues, and gives us jazz—all quintessentially American. On 78s, we can hear and learn of the other peoples of the world: of ragas and gamalans, performers who do not traverse great oceans, the cultures of foreign lands we could only read about. We can feel the despondency of the Great Depression in the songs that empathize with the struggles of a nation. Through 78s we can hear firsthand accounts of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the angry, vile speeches of dictators, the songs that inspired a once divided nation to pull together in a common cause against evil, to fight for peace for our time, for days that will live in infamy. Bursting out of the war to end all wars, big bands, swing, then rock n’ roll. It makes one long to hear Bach play the organ, Mozart play the piano, Paganini play the violin, or Orpheus beg for the turn of Euridice, and know, that if we preserved these 78rpm recordings, future generations will understand our joys and pains, to have a window, through sound, into the arc of history, the slow advance of progress of the human condition.
To remember half of recorded history, it is important to preserve 78rpm discs.
About the author
George Blood is an expert in the audio and video preservation industry.
This October, we are publishing The Vanishing Culture Report, a new open access report examining the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.
As more content is created digitally and provided to individuals and memory institutions through temporary licensing deals rather than ownership, materials such as sound recordings, books, television shows, and films are at constant risk of being removed from streaming platforms. This means they are vanishing from our culture without ever being archived or preserved by libraries.
But the threat of vanishing is not exclusive to digital content. As time marches on, analog materials on obsolete formats—VHS tapes, 78rpm recordings, floppy disks—are deteriorating and require urgent attention to ensure their survival. Without proper archiving, digitization, and access, the cultural artifacts stored in these formats are in danger of being lost forever.
By highlighting the importance of ownership and preservation in the digital age, The Vanishing Culture Report aims to inform individuals, institutions, and policymakers about the breadth and scale of cultural loss thus far, and inspire them to take proactive steps in ensuring that our cultural record remains accessible for future generations.
Share Your Story!
As part of the Vanishing Culture report, we’d like to hear from you. We invite you to share your stories about why preservation is important for the media you use on our site. Whether it’s a website crawl in the Wayback Machine, a rare book that shaped your perspective, a vintage film that captured your imagination, or a collection that you revisit often, we want to know why preserving these items is important to you. Share your story now!
