[HN Gopher] "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became publi...
___________________________________________________________________
"Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)
Author : edavis
Score : 58 points
Date : 2025-05-06 20:14 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (screenrant.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (screenrant.com)
| gus_massa wrote:
| Note that it was released in 1968. The law changed since then.
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice
|
| > _For works first published on or after March 1, 1989, use of
| the copyright notice is optional. Before March 1, 1989, the use
| of the notice was mandatory on all published works. Omitting the
| notice on any work first published from January 1, 1978, to
| February 28, 1989, could have resulted in the loss of copyright
| protection if corrective steps were not taken within a certain
| amount of time. Works published before January 1, 1978, are
| governed by the 1909 Copyright Act. Under that law, if a work was
| published under the copyright owner 's authority without a proper
| notice of copyright, all copyright protection for that work was
| permanently lost in the United States._
| dahart wrote:
| This March 1 1989 date is when the adoption of the Berne
| Convention took effect in the US, the Berne Convention being
| what brings the notion that registration should not be required
| in order to have legal copyright protections. European artists
| had that protection for ~100 years at that point. Most
| countries in the world have adopted the Berne Convention,
| though I learned fairly recently here on HN that the US is
| still leaving out a few important bits like the right to sue
| for statutory damages unless copyrights are registered.
| bluGill wrote:
| You can sue for damages if you don't have the copyright
| registered in the US. If you have the copyright registered
| you can sue for triple damages. (according to my mandatory
| company copyright training, a real lawyer is welcome to
| correct me)
|
| Edit: I just remembered that you cannot sue if your copyright
| is not registered - but you don't have to register until just
| before you sue. Triple damages applies to anything that
| happens after the copyright is registered, but that is the
| only difference it makes.
| tzs wrote:
| I think your training may have confused copyrights,
| patents, and trademarks.
|
| Patent law allows triple damages in the case of willful
| infringement, and trademark allows triple damages in the
| case of a counterfeit mark that the infringer knew was
| counterfeit.
|
| Copyright does have some things that can increase a damage
| award but there is no real triple damages mechanism.
|
| The plaintiff in copyright gets a choice. They can ask for
| either:
|
| * The actual damages plus the profits that the infringer
| made from the infringement. The latter is only to the
| extent that the infringer's profits exceeded the actual
| damages.
|
| E.g., if you lost $100k due to infringement and the
| infringer made $70k your damages would be $100k. But if the
| infringer made $120k your damages would be $120k (the $100k
| you lost plus the $20k the infringer made over $100k).
|
| * Statutory damages. It is often very hard to figure out
| actual damages so the law allows an alternative. If you
| elect statutory damages the damages range from $750 to
| $30000 per work infringed. The amount is determined by the
| judge or jury.
|
| They can be decreased to as low as $200 if the infringer
| "was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her
| acts constituted an infringement of copyright".
|
| They can be increase up to $150000 if the infringement is
| found to be willful. This is the closest thing copyright as
| to triple damages.
|
| The way registration affects all of this is:
|
| * You have to register before filing a copyright lawsuit.
| There are some exceptions such as when a foreign copyright
| owner wants to sue over a work not published in the US but
| infringed in the US, due to Berne Convention requirements
| but we can ignore those here.
|
| * You can only collect statutory damages for infringement
| that commences after registration (unless the registration
| is within 3 months of first publication).
|
| * You can collect actual damages and infringer profits from
| infringement before registration.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _Night of the Living Dead 's copyright snafu ended up costing
| him untold amounts of money in both the short and long term._
|
| This has strong vibes of "If only Linus Torvalds had charged for
| Linux, he would have been a rich man today.". It does not work
| that way.
|
| > _Somewhat ironically though, it 's Night of the Living Dead's
| freely available nature that helped it become the revered classic
| it is today, as easy access and constant TV airings ensured that
| more and more people saw the film._
|
| It's not "ironic", it's completely expected. If it was only an
| old black-and-white movie, still subject to copyright, today the
| movie would be a historical footnote at best.
| dublinben wrote:
| This is exactly the same way that It's A Wonderful Life became
| a much-revered Christmas classic. If the copyright hadn't
| expired allowing monthlong TV marathons, it would have faded
| into obscurity. How many people remember The Best Years of Our
| Lives, which beat it out for multiple Oscars in 1947?
| glimshe wrote:
| What is the middle ground? Everybody knows that "free" has a
| huge appeal. But so does low cost, which arguably vastly
| reduced piracy for older movies and music. It seems that
| content providers found ways to unlock content by paying
| creators fractions of a cent. It would be cool if there was a
| standard way to acquire license for older content for very
| little without dealing with the copyright headaches.
| rwmj wrote:
| Copyrighted and then falls into the public domain after 14
| years. Plenty of time to monetize, then benefits the public
| after a relatively short people of time.
| conception wrote:
| Or you get 10-14 years for free and after that you pay
| for it and it gets more and more expensive the older it
| is. Disney can keep their mouse but after 90 years its
| 100M. 91? 105M. Etc. If it's not worth the price, let it
| go.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| This makes sense from a purely economic perspective (if
| you scale the fee exponentially). It does not make sense
| from a "promote the arts" standpoint. Derivative works
| are a huge portion of human expression, and allowing the
| most valuable/influential ideas to be kept from the
| public would continue (albeit to a lesser degree) the
| creative harm of the current copyright regime.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| It shouldn't be completely free for the initial period.
| Require a nominal fee (and registration) to pay for
| escrow/archive storage so it can be properly released
| into the public domain when copyright expires.
| ghaff wrote:
| Registration basically benefits large corporations. There
| are good reasons why a lot of individual authors oppose
| orphan works legislation. Disney isn't going to forget or
| screw up copyright registration. You or your kids might.
|
| Totally in favor of shorter copyright terms though even
| where there are edge cases where longer terms seemingly
| have made sense. (In terms of promoting progress of the
| arts, etc. or whatever the language is, I'm not sure that
| usually fairly small inheritances qualify.)
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Registration benefits the general public, who are the
| meant to be the beneficiaries of the whole scheme in the
| first place. The entire purpose is to generate a larger
| wealth of public domain material. Registration and escrow
| ensures this happens.
| Andrex wrote:
| Giving large companies, but not the average Joe, the
| ability to retain copyright defeats the purpose of
| copyright being for artists.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Copyright has been about corporations, not artists, for a
| long time.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Copyright has been about corporations, not artists, for
| a long time.
|
| That doesn't mean that we should lean into it.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| What if copyright expired in 18 months? Same thing.
|
| 14 years made sense when there were wooden printing
| presses and the fastest communication was a rider and a
| horse carrying a handwritten letter sealed in wax. They
| arguably need less time to monetize today than they did
| back then. Years-long (or, as it is now decades-long and
| centuries-long) periods are about giving someone the
| right to tax culture for many generations, not about
| incentivizing creativity. It undermines the public
| domain.
| Retric wrote:
| 18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing
| to buy something on month 17... I'd be tempted never to
| pay for another movie again and I suspect a large
| fraction of people would react similarly.
|
| 5 years is probably at the lower end of actually
| extracting a large fraction of total value on most works
| and yet not hampering cultural remixes.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing
| to buy something on month 17
|
| Well, that's one way to look at it. The other way is that
| it merely limits how much it can be sold for on month 17.
| When I was in high school, one of the big malls had a
| dollar-a-ticket movie theater. People would pay for
| things that are more easily/cheaply available soon, they
| just won't pay the premiums demanded now.
|
| But there's a third way to look at it... the idea that
| they never owned the intellectual property anyway. It
| always belonged to the public domain, they had a
| temporary lease. And in that view, the idea that they'd
| have trouble extracting maximum dollars from it on the
| day before the lease ends is absurd. No one cares, nor
| should they care.
|
| >I'd be tempted never to pay for another movie again a
|
| Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that
| temptation, and it is the superior experience. I can do
| all the streaming I need, to any of my devices (or my
| friends' devices) anywhere in the world. Everything on
| demand, from every premium channel and streaming service,
| in the highest resolution. Every minute or every day. I
| read comments here and elsewhere about people complaining
| how they have to cancel Netflix, the show's over, but
| they have to resubscribe to Disney because the new show's
| on, etc. It's all bizarre. The stuff you guys are willing
| to put up with is mind-boggling.
|
| >5 years is probably at the lower end of actually
| extracting a large fraction of total value
|
| You should be concerned with whether they can extract
| their costs, plus modest profit. Not "value". The
| magnitude of the grift in the industry that gave us the
| term "Hollywood accounting" is beyond human imagination
| or capacity to comprehend. Stop enabling that.
| Retric wrote:
| > Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that
| temptation, and it is the superior experience.
|
| Ethics
|
| > You should be concerned with whether they can extract
| their costs, plus modest profit.
|
| The creative industry isn't wildly profitable. Slash the
| amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you
| dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc
| published.
|
| After all we could totally remove copyright, but then you
| don't get leech off the fruits of other people's labor if
| they never preform that labor.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _Slash the amount of money movies /books/etc make on
| average and you dramatically reduce the amount of
| movies/books/etc published._
|
| Published _for profit_.
|
| There are numerous other incentives to produce books.
|
| Schopenhauer has something to say about publication for
| profit:
|
| <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Literature/On_
| Auth...>
| Retric wrote:
| Hogwash.
|
| Producing books without a profit motive requires some
| other means to support the vast time investment. Thus
| robbing the world of great works from those lesser
| creatures who still need to work for a living.
|
| The only _loss_ is competition drowning out the works of
| well off but talentless people. We'll get vanity projects
| either way, what we lose is however irreplaceable.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Profit motive's not doing much for great works of
| literature:
|
| "The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction"
| (2024)
|
| _Serious readers must expand their tastes to the small
| presses._
|
| <https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-
| publishers-h...>
|
| I've some direct exposure to this in my role of keeping a
| visually-deprived friend in books, going through a very
| large national library's collection of 300k+ audiobooks.
| Their tastes tend to run through mid-20th-century
| literary works, largely European authors. We've at least
| sampled some 2k--4k titles (it's difficult to get a
| precise count through the tools I'm using though I think
| I might be able to squeeze that out).
|
| I've had to get immensely creative with searches
| (something I've many decades of experience with myself),
| and trust me, lists of recognised literary awards have
| been squeezed for all they're worth. There's simply
| little published since 1970 that's of remote interest.
|
| I'll allow that some of that is due to frustratingly
| narrow tastes. But seeing articles such as I've linked
| above rather reinforces my view.
|
| There _is_ a lot of popular and some mid-list work. But
| Great Fiction? If it 's being produced, it's also getting
| buried by sludge.
| Retric wrote:
| The big five are hardly the only purveyors of for profit
| works.
|
| Go back through any list of the great works and you'll
| find a great deal of populist authors. Shakespeare,
| Dickens, Herman Melville, etc were producing the exact
| kinds of works you're looking down on.
|
| Perhaps something fundamentally changed, but it seems
| more likely bias is talking here.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| William Shakespeare (c. 23 April 1564 - 23 April 1616)
| predates the first modern copyright law, the Statute of
| Anne (1710), by roughly a century. His income came from
| _performances_ , that is, asses in seats, not book sales.
| His posthumous _fame_ came in large part from the fact
| that those published plays were free from copyright
| encumberance and could be performed or published without
| licence fee.
|
| Dickens pioneered the model of serial publication on
| which other authors of his time (notably Tolstoy) made
| much comment.
|
| You've failed to mention Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who
| was constantly in debt, damned near killed himself with
| one of his two possessions (a revolver, the other being a
| nickel), broke and unemployed in San Francisco. His
| relative financial flush later in life was largely due to
| his father-in-law's support. And asses-in-seats on the
| lecture circuit.
|
| Melville, like many other authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald of
| _Gatsby_ fame comes to mind) saw a greatly-increased fame
| _after_ his death, with _Moby Dick_ becoming
| reestablished on the centennial of Melville 's birth,
| some 28 years after his death. Melville worked during his
| life as a clerk, sailor, and farmer. His writing career
| met with very limited financial success. His _works_ were
| great, no doubt, his _income_ failed to measure up, and
| could hardly be considered his chief incentive. Later in
| life, like Twain, Melville benefitted by inheritance and
| lectures.
| Retric wrote:
| The point you seemed to have missed was each of them were
| _populist authors._. To look down on populist writing is
| to misunderstand western literature.
|
| Further we never got to read a book by Shakespeare
| _because_ of the lack of copyright at the time. Imagine a
| world where he had more time to devote to such things.
|
| Similarly Dickens was hampered by being paid by the word.
|
| Melville on the other hand wrote Moby-Dick through the
| commercial success of less famous works. What happened
| later in life isn't particularly relevant here, what's
| generally considered the greatest work of western
| literature was completely dependent on someone being paid
| for their writing. It wasn't some breakout novel from a
| new writer it's the culmination of serious refinement of
| his talents that takes not just inspiration and life
| experience but time.
| quesera wrote:
| > _The creative industry isn't wildly profitable_
|
| There are a lot of profits in the industry, but as I
| think you're alluding to, not a great proportion of those
| profits go to the creators.
|
| I want a model where I can compensate artists and
| creators (up to and including producers) equally to (or
| better than) the distribution and marketing arms. This
| can be cobbled together in some cases, but not simply.
| Retric wrote:
| > not a great proportion of those profits go to the
| creators
|
| That's often stated but misses the underlying reality is
| that the money is mostly spent on things which increase
| revenue. An unadvertised movie means less people pay for
| tickets, remove it and there's less to go to everyone
| else.
|
| > equally to (or better than) the distribution and
| marketing arms.
|
| Obviously there's fat to be cut from these industries but
| being a self published author isn't some shortcut to
| success and would become even harder with very short
| copyright terms.
|
| Some authors are finding success on Patreon etc, but it
| further limits the talent pool by requiring more than
| just being a good writer.
| quesera wrote:
| You're right. Marketing is expensive. Distribution is
| cheap these days, but often the two functions are
| colocated.
|
| I would even posit that many popular creative works are
| commercially worthless, absent the expensive marketing.
| And in some cases, the marketing comes first and the
| creative work is basically an effort to fulfill the
| marketing spec. Implicitly or explicitly.
|
| But like venture capital, the entertainment industry is
| sustained by the huge successes, and they are motivated
| to overspend on every attempt. This _works_ in VC (for
| founders at least) but it doesn 't work well for artists.
|
| I don't have a solution, but I wish for something that
| would bypass the go-big-or-go-home model while fostering
| organic success. (And I'm thinking of the music industry
| primarily. Movies and books occupy different spots on the
| continuum, though some of the same issues do apply.)
| bluGill wrote:
| It takes more than 18 months for many good works to get
| through all the editing processes. You can tell when
| publishers skip on that time as the quality is worse.
| rakoo wrote:
| elevates*
|
| Language has meaning, and the puplic domain is a better
| situation for society. It is more interesting to say it
| ascended
| rakoo wrote:
| Piracy is only bad if you want to earn money for each eye
| watching a minute of a movie. What we're doing right now is
| piracy, no one pays anyone anything for content
|
| The question shouldn't be about how much it costs but why
| do things cost anything in the beginning, and if they have
| to what is the amount a specific piece should be retributed
| for its contribution to society minus how the non-zero cost
| impacts society.
|
| AIs are being let off the hook with their massive copyright
| infringement but when a movie being open directly benefits
| everyone suddenly that's a problem.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| >Piracy is only bad if you want to earn money for each
| eye watching a minute of a movie. What we're doing right
| now is piracy, no one pays anyone anything for content
|
| This is utterly nonsensical. You've invented a new
| definition of piracy to try to claim that streaming
| services are piracy.
|
| Specifically at this point:
|
| >no one pays anyone anything for content
|
| This is literally factually incorrect. Netflix pays
| billions per year to copyright holders. Just because it's
| indirect payment in the form of a subscription doesn't
| mean you're not paying for the right to view content.
| graemep wrote:
| The middle ground could be a lot of different things. One
| might be a reformed copyright system.
|
| The economist I know of who calculated a socially optimal
| copyright duration, Rufus Pollock, came up with an estimate
| of 20 something years.
|
| This makes sense from the point of view of finance because
| the NPV of extra years beyond this is very low. To put it
| in qualitative terms, no one is thinking about their
| grandchildren's pensions when they decide to create a work.
|
| Personally I would also have different durations and rules
| for different types of work: a book, a video, and a piece
| of software are very different works and need diffferent
| incentives
| drewcoo wrote:
| /me raises hook hand . . . Myrna Loy . . .
| Finnucane wrote:
| I've seen The Best Years of Our Lives several times; it plays
| regularly on TCM.
| stuart78 wrote:
| The Best Years of Our Lives is a genuine classic. Complex
| narrative, brilliant cinematography and performances. It is a
| much more difficult film than It's A Wonderful Life, and
| absolutely worth watching.
| Ecgberht wrote:
| > If it was only an old black-and-white movie, still subject to
| copyright, today the movie would be a historical footnote at
| best.
|
| That's a very ungenerous take. The film is very good and was
| revolutionary for it's time. Check out other horror films from
| the same era and the tone is completely different. Night of the
| Living Dead changed what horror films could be.
|
| And there's plenty of old black and white movies still in
| copyright that are highly regarded as classics so I don't know
| what that has to do with anything.
| derbOac wrote:
| I share your perspective; my guess is if it was copyrighted
| it probably would have had the same status. My guess is it
| would have been distributed relatively cheaply with the same
| outcome.
|
| However, I also think it's reasonable to posit it might not
| have attained the same status had it not gone out of
| copyright. Easy access can really affect awareness and buzz
| around films, especially in certain genres like horror.
|
| Horror films were already shifting in tone by 1968. Psycho
| was a 1960 release, for example, and The Birds was released
| in 1963. Carnival of Souls has a similar aesthetic as Night
| of the Living Dead and was released in 1962.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| The movie invented the zombie genre as we know it today,
| was made by George Romero, which is a credential in an of
| itself, and Duane Jones' performance as Ben would stand out
| today almost as much as it did back then. These points,
| along with the film being poignant and entertaining as hell
| would ensure that generation after generation would would
| keep coming back. Remember, lots of films are out of
| copyright. Not a lot of such films made as much money or
| have the staying power as Night of the Living Dead.
|
| On top of this, genre films in general, and horror
| specifically, if anything, have rabid fans that go out of
| their way to watch movies because of their genre,
| regardless of accessibility or buzz. Again, George Romero's
| involvement alone would make sure that even a passing fan
| of horror (or budding cinephiles) would seek it out.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _Night of the Living Dead changed what horror films could
| be._
|
| And this would indeed merit the film a historical footnote.
| But it would be virtually unavailable, and nobody in a
| position to make it available would take the chance on an
| ancient black-and-white film. And it would therefore in all
| likelihood languish in obscurity.
| ghaff wrote:
| We had (many) version of Unix that were superior to Linux for a
| very long time. We can reasonable debate what Sun (in
| particular) should have done differently with SunOS/Solaris and
| Java in particular, but a for-pay-only version of Linux would
| just have been a fairly mediocre Unix variant.
| joekrill wrote:
| > This has strong vibes of "If only Linus Torvalds had charged
| for Linux, he would have been a rich man today.". It does not
| work that way.
|
| Not at all similar. Linus explicitly made his software free.
| Romero didn't _intentionally_ exclude the copyright notice, and
| had no explicit intention of making it free.
|
| > It's not "ironic", it's completely expected. If it was only
| an old black-and-white movie, still subject to copyright, today
| the movie would be a historical footnote at best.
|
| "completely expected" is quite a stretch. Simply making it
| public domain wouldn't be enough. It still has to be a good
| movie. I'm sure there are countless other public domain black-
| and-white movies that no one has ever heard of.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| >I'm sure there are countless other public domain black-and-
| white movies that no one has ever heard of.
|
| See: MST3K and RiffTrax
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Did the distributor really have sufficient ownership of the movie
| to release a minor altered version into the public domain?
|
| I remember a long time ago a language study startup called
| smart.fm released their material on RSS under a copy left
| license. Problem was that they didn't mean to give it away, but
| worse, they didn't have the license to relicense the material
| like that.
|
| I kinda wonder where that puts redistribution of that material.
| cobbzilla wrote:
| It wasn't a relicense, the copyright was never validly filed
| (date was missing), so the copyright was never registered. Only
| registered copyrights can be enforced in the US. No
| registration, no enforcement rights. Or at least that's my
| layman's understanding, happy to be corrected.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This is not the case. If registration were required in the
| US, 99.999999% of software ever written would be effectively
| public domain.
| cobbzilla wrote:
| 99.9999999% of software written is not published, it's
| covered by trade secret law. Copyright only applies to
| published works. Look into what happens legally when source
| code is leaked and published.
| graemep wrote:
| its covered by trade secret and copyright.
|
| Software can simultaneously be covered by copyright,
| trade secret and patents. The patents have to disclose
| some info, of course.
|
| Even when distributed you can distribute just the binary,
| and keep the source a trade secret.
| toast0 wrote:
| The copyright rules have changed. Registration and a proper
| notice was required when this film was published.
|
| Now, fixing a creative work in a tangible medium is all
| that's required. When does the copyright expire? Nobody
| will know, because there's no year of publication listed,
| and no author listed to find out when they die. (Even if
| there is an author listed by name, maybe it was me; maybe
| it was the Pulitzer Prize winning author)
| kmoser wrote:
| > This error occurred after the film's title was changed from
| its original moniker Night of the Flesh Eaters. Prints with
| that title contained the copyright notice, but when new
| prints were created using the title Night of the Living Dead,
| the copyright notice was forgotten.
|
| This begs the question: if the original movie was
| copyrighted, how does releasing the same movie with a
| different title make the new re-release considered a new
| (not-yet-copyrighted) work? I thought the copyright
| protection of the original would extend to the renamed
| version, since they're 99.99% the same. Theoretically, does
| changing even one frame necessitate a new copyright?
| bluGill wrote:
| Remember we need to talk about law as it existed back when
| this happened not the law today. Back then you didn't get
| copyright protection unless you registered with the
| copyright office (and a few other things that I'm not quite
| sure of - none relevant to the law today). So the copyright
| was never registered, likely because the distributor was
| expected to register it and they failed to do their job.
| There might be a lawsuit against the distributor for breach
| of contract, but it wouldn't be a copyright lawsuit.
|
| Today things are much easier, if you create something it is
| copyright. If you want to sue you need to register, but you
| can register at anytime. If you register you can sue for
| triple damages for anything that happens after you
| register, but you can still get damages for things that
| happened before your register. (The above is my
| understanding of the law, but I'm not a lawyer)
| sumtechguy wrote:
| > Did the distributor really have sufficient ownership of the
| movie to release a minor altered version into the public
| domain?
|
| Probably yes. The way movies are financed is quite the
| byzantine joy ride if you want to look into it. With random tax
| incentives depending on where you make it. To finance groups
| that get control of entire regions. There are quite a large
| number of videos from independent filmmakers on what is going
| on. You hear things like 'Disney lost XYZ on a movie'. More
| than likely they lost someone else's money making sure they
| recoup first. Like for example the OG star wars has yet to
| recoup. Probably for some segments of the corporate structure
| that was created to make that movie that is probably true.
| Hollywood accounting is a huge mess. So yeah he probably signed
| off particular distribution rights to get the money to
| make/distribute the thing.
|
| Many TV show pilots probably fall into the same issue too. I
| have not dug into it too much but the original pilot of star
| trek did not have one until a re-release decades later with an
| obvious digital watermark.
| ralferoo wrote:
| I guess stuff like this would have already been thrashed out at
| the time, but it strikes me that if a mistake by a third party
| could invalidate copyright, it'd have been trivial to end the
| copyright on anything by releasing an unauthorised version
| without a copyright notice.
|
| I guess it's complicated because the first release with this
| title was absent the copyright notice, but the article also
| says that prints existed with the previous title and a
| copyright notice, so if they were distributed at all, it'd seem
| to be a slam dunk that it'd be covered by copyright on the
| original title and the retitled copy without copyright notices
| was infringing.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| It isn't the case that a third party mistake can invalidate
| copyright. But if a third party does so & other groups start
| treating it as public domain it is on the actual rightsholder
| to prove they still hold the copyright.
|
| In the case of a self published book, it's pretty obvious. In
| the case a movie production or otherwise, it gets difficult
| really fast. Throw in some corporate mergers, acquisitions, &
| bankruptcies and now you're looking at paying a small team of
| legal professionals to do research to construct a paper trail
| for ownership. If the work in question is valuable, obviously
| it gets done.
|
| In the modern era there is a basically endless stream of
| video games from a 2-3 decades back where the ownership is
| completely unclear. The actual video game release rights
| might be held by one shell company, the video game source
| code could be held by another group (or even the original
| author, depending on how lazy people were), and the assets
| themselves might be held by another group if it was a
| "branded" or similar content.
| Malic wrote:
| The same thing happened to the 1963 movie "Charade" (with Cary
| Grant and Audrey Hepburn):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charade_(1963_film)#Public-dom...
| nico wrote:
| It's wild that copyright lasts this long (life of author + 70
| years after death)
| mathgeek wrote:
| > an unfortunate error accidentally made it public domain
|
| Never have I been so torn on my opinion of whether or not this
| was truly "unfortunate".
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