Every January 1, a small but meaningful shift happens in our culture. Works that were once protected by copyright become free for anyone to use.

This moment is called Public Domain Day, and in 2026 it brings a surprising number of creative works back into shared ownership.

On January 1, 2026, most works published in 1930 will enter the public domain in the United States. Sound recordings from 1925 will also become free to use. No permissions. No licensing. No gatekeepers.

What Becomes Free

This year’s group is especially interesting. It includes well-known books, characters, music, and films that still feel alive today.

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying enters the public domain, along with Agatha Christie’s first Miss Marple mystery and the earliest Nancy Drew books. Early versions of Betty Boop and Pluto become free to reuse. Classic films starring the Marx Brothers, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo are included. Popular songs like Georgia on My Mind and Dream a Little Dream of Me are also part of the list.

These are not forgotten works. They are stories and ideas that still shape how we think and create.

Why Does it Matter?

When something enters the public domain, it becomes available to everyone. Books can be republished without cost. Artists can remix or reinterpret older work. Teachers and students can share material freely. Filmmakers and designers can build on familiar characters without legal risk.

Much of what we love today exists because earlier creators had access to the public domain. Shakespeare reused old stories. Disney built its earliest films from public domain fairy tales. Creativity has always depended on shared material.

A Quiet but Important Day

Public Domain Day does not come with celebrations or announcements. Most people never notice it. But every year, it quietly adds more culture back into the public space.

Public Domain Day 2026 is not about looking backward. It is about giving old work a future. Once a year, a small door opens, and what steps through it belongs to all of us.

Read more on Public Domain Day 2026.

The post What Gets Released on Public Domain Day 2026 appeared first on Moss and Fog.

It’s Blogvent, day 13, where I blog daily in December!

I don’t mean to make this a hardcore hot take, but… vibe coding is boring.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been trying it out, and it can be fairly effective. It’s innovative. I started my app PocketCal with AI and it worked pretty well, in addition to some personal apps I’ve made for myself.

I have been playing around with Spec Kit and sudocode this week (full disclaimer, Spec Kit is from GitHub, where I work, and sudocode sponsored my newsletter this week) and it’s really great how powerful it is to be able to define good specifications, hand them off to some agents, and then make my side projects an actual reality instead of losing motivation after buying a domain name.

That being said… after doing the cool thinking work and creating the specifications, after I hand things off to the agent, I get bored. I have GitHub Copilot building something literally as I write this blog post. There’s a handful of personal tools I’ve been making for myself and it’s fun to have the final result, but I’ve literally dozed off watching the agents work multiple times this week, because they aren’t interesting in the editor. Just watching the code being written instead of doing anything is like this era’s “watching paint dry” or “watching grass grow.” Or better, “my code’s compiling.”

I don’t know if this is necessarily a bad thing. This is the future that AI companies are pitching, to “give the boring work to the computer so that you can do the interesting work.” But as I work more with these tools in and outside of work, I have really re-learned how much I do love coding, and don’t find it that tedious. I don’t really like vibe coding. There’s no joy in it. There’s no “YAY I am a GENIUS because I FIGURED IT OUT” feeling. It’s just there. It’s boring.

For apps that I want to ship to the world, for this website, for apps that are using an interesting tech stack, I will be driving development, because I like it, and I have enough experience to have opinions on how they should be built.

But for the apps where I just care about the final output, that’s what vibe coding is for, I suppose. I don’t ever want to rely on it so much that I lose my own skills, but it is nice getting those results faster if I truly don’t care how something works (which is rare, but I have a few projects in the pile that are finally built now, so yay). But yeah. It’s not fun. It’s just another tool in the tool belt. And it’s really boring.

Yesterday I wrote:

For the last 40 years Apple has only gone through three identity fonts: Garamond → Myriad → San Francisco.

DF reader Cameron McKay emailed to observe: “It strikes me that Apple changes CPU architectures (68K → PowerPC → Intel → ARM) more often than identity fonts. They’d sooner re-engineer their products’ deepest technical building blocks than change typefaces. I suspect that’s rare among tech companies.”

I wish I’d thought to mention that yesterday.

I’ll add that I suspect San Francisco might effectively be Apple’s “forever font”. Forever is a long time, but San Francisco, in its default appearance, strives for the sort of timelessness that Helvetica achieved. And San Francisco offers a wide (no pun intended) variety of widths and weights. This is San Francisco. This is too. (Screenshots for posterity, when Apple’s website changes: iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air.)

I also suspect that Apple Silicon is Apple’s “forever architecture”.