Great Gatsby Now Belongs to Everyone

The new year brings a new list of books, movies, and music that enter the public domain, meaning their copyright protections expire. In this case, works from 1925 are those losing their protection, and NPR notes that the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald highlights the list. The Verge takes note of this, too, and is already calling for a Muppets adaptation now that the story is fair game. That's no joke. "The Muppets' takes on classic stories are often better," writes Ian Carlos Campbell, citing A Christmas Carol as example. Read on for a sampling of other titles via NPR, which got a curated list from Duke's Jennifer Jenkins, director of the university's Center for the Study of the Public Domain:

• Books: In addition to Gatsby, the list includes Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway, The Trial (in German) by Franz Kafka, and An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.
• Movies: Buster Keaton's Go West, Harold Lloyd's The Freshman, The Merry Widow, and Lovers in Quarantine.
• Music: "Always” by Irving Berlin, “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson, and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey’s “Shave ’Em Dry.”

Read the full curated list here. Read the complete list here. (More The Great Gatsby stories.)