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OK, so someone mentioned that it's not too hard to research individual films to see if they are PD or if they are copyrighted.

I have not been able to find this kind of information. So where is this information that can be easily accessed?

Thanks
Ed

Other than paying for the Copyright Office to do a search, the easiest way to look up the status of a title is the Film Superlist, a series of large, hardcover volumes that list every film registered for copyright in a given timeframe. I've only looked at the 1894-1939 book, the first one published. If a film was renewed, it has a dot next to the title and the renewal date and number--but alas, not the renewing entity--handwritten beside it. (I'm guessing it used photo-offset printing.) There are also volumes for the 40s and 50s; you can buy them on Amazon but they'll set you back about $400-500 each.

The Film Superlist probably shouldn't be taken as legal advice; since it was published in 1973 there have been changes in copyright law and its interpretation. Many (possibly most) European films released in the U.S. that were registered for a domestic copyright weren't renewed, and until the mid-90s independent distributors treated them as PD. But that was changed by the controversial URAA of 1994 that restored foreign copyrights. Likewise, some non-renewed films have underlying literary sources or music that's protected.

-Harold

Jim Reid said: these days on the internet it's not difficult to find a film's copyright status....

..in another thread, so I assumed there was some easy internet connection. Again, I've never had much luck looking up this stuff.....

isn't there something at the library of congress website?

and, again, this only refers to public domain within the USA, not elsewhere. What is out of copyright in the US may be in copyright in Europe and vice versa.

Nothing I've ever seen at LOC. In fact when I decided to buy a print of a film from LOC, when I selected a post-1923 film, there was a long process that cost money for ME to chase down the copyright (if there was one), so I bought a film that predated the 1923 mark and avoided the issue.

drednm wrote:OK, so someone mentioned that it's not too hard to research individual films to see if they are PD or if they are copyrighted.

I have not been able to find this kind of information. So where is this information that can be easily accessed?

Thanks
Ed

It's not that hard if you know how the Copyright Office arranged the information. All registrations/renewals since 1/1/1978 are online at the copyright office website.

Information prior to that date was published (every six months) in the Catalog of Copyright Entries. The CCE had many sections, and sometimes all the renewals were combined, and other times they were at the end of each category (e.g. motion pictures, books).

Some of the catalogs are online at the internet archive (archive.org), and google books has others. There used to be a website that has all of that material, but I can't find it right now.

If you post the list of titles, I or someone else can probably help you out.

David Pierce
Media History Digital Library
http://www.archive.org/details/mediahistory

My statement wasn't meant to say that you can get the official copyright status easily, but that if you come on boards like this there are folks you will let you know the status of a film. There are many people on this board who I would trust what they would tell me about a film's status.

Now if I was going to start selling DVDs of a film I believe to be PD, I would probably go the official route and have a copyright search done. Here we're only talking about buying DVDs out of the back of a truck.

Here's a list of all Warner Brothers cartoons (including a few choice Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons) that are in the public domain. Note that some of these were black and white, but were re-colored and re-drawn in the 1960s, and those versions are still copyrighted.

The public domain Our Gang sound films are Bear Shooters, School's Out, Our Gang Follies of 1938 and (made at MGM) Waldo's Last Stand. There are quite a few silents, especially Pathé silents that are PD, but most of the Our Gang MGM-Roach films are copyrighted. Wikipedia has a questionable list of more sound shorts that are PD.

The only Laurel & Hardy films that are P.D. are Flying Deuces, Utopia, Tree in a Test Tube, and The Stolen Jools.

Archive.org has tons of PD films available for download. They do remove films that have been posted and are later determined to be copyrighted.

Desert Island Films distributes films to TV stations and other venues and they have researched all of the films on their website.

Some well known post-1922 public domain films (at least PD in the USA):


Carole Lombard, Walter Connolly, and Fredric March in Nothing Sacred (1937)


Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Roland Young, and Billie Burke in Topper Returns (1940)


Catherine Lacey, Paul Lukas, Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave in The Lady Vanishes (1938)


Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr in Algiers (1938)


Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in At War With the Army (1950)


Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper in A Farewell to Arms (1932)


Cary Grant and Rosiland Russell in His Girl Friday


Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage (1934)


Madeleine Carroll and John Gielgud in Secret Agent (1936)


Mary Pickford in Sparrows (1926)


Creighton Hale and Laura LaPlante in The Cat and the Canary (1927)


Buster Keaton in College (1927)


Marion Mack, Frederick Vroom?, and Buster Keaton in The General (1927)


Mary Philbin in The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

When I research titles for my movie series, I use two sites that are quite good. Since they are stock footage companies, they have researched the titles and I trust their results:

http://www.buyoutfootage.com/

http://www.reelmediainternational.com/classic.htm

Some people use Archive.org, but I'm not comfortable with them since some of their titles are a bit "iffy" as far as PD status, as well as Wikipedia's listings, which oftentimes are not researched.

Another thing to consider is the music content of PD films--for public exhibition, the facility needs an ASCAP license if a PD musical is shown, since the vast majority of pop music in the last 80 years is still under copyright.

For very obscure titles, the above two companies do not have an exhaustive listing.

silentfilm wrote:
The only Laurel & Hardy films that are P.D. are Flying Deuces, Utopia, Tree in a Test Tube, and The Stolen Jools.

Shouldn't that list also include BE BIG (1931) since it was copyrighted under the title THE CHISELERS? The title "Be Big" is not in the copyright book, and there have been numerous P.D. Laurel & Hardy collections over the years that included BE BIG. Were they releasing that short illegally?

And what's the status of all the foreign-language L & H films?

I, too have seen BE BIG in older collections of DVD shorts, but this title doesn't show up in either of the sites I mentioned before.

Just like CHARADE, this title may have been challenged for PD status and most PD distributors and resellers have omitted it from their lists.

I happened to watch `Till The Clouds Roll By' (1946) the other day and was thinking how depressing it is that during the dread Kerkorkian era, MGM simply ceased defending its copyright and allowed it to lapse into PD.

The film's no masterpiece, but it's certainly not the B-movie by a fly-by-nighter that many a PD film is. It's a decent example of the quality of MGM's production values and the variety of its stars - and yet less than 30 years after its production, it was essentially considered valueless.

Apparently, this was even considered shocking enough to get national headlines when it occurred in 1973. Does anyone have more info on that?

There were several MGM features of that period where the studio failed to renew the copyright. At that time, it was a case of renew during the 28th year after registration, or it goes out of copyright.
This appears to be more a case of some sloppiness in the legal department than anything else. No point trying to blame it on the majority stockholder, who probably had no idea this was happening.

In THE CAT AND CANARY photo, that's Creighton Hale holding our villain.

other caption correction:

Fredric March
Walter Connolly
Margaret Lockwood

great photos

Brooksie wrote:I happened to watch `Till The Clouds Roll By' (1946) the other day and was thinking how depressing it is that during the dread Kerkorkian era, MGM simply ceased defending its copyright and allowed it to lapse into PD.

The film's no masterpiece, but it's certainly not the B-movie by a fly-by-nighter that many a PD film is. It's a decent example of the quality of MGM's production values and the variety of its stars - and yet less than 30 years after its production, it was essentially considered valueless.

Apparently, this was even considered shocking enough to get national headlines when it occurred in 1973. Does anyone have more info on that?

I don't know how [well, now I do--grazie, Ian!]

MGM renewed almost all of their holdings, including their shorts and pre-1924 Metro and Goldwyn pictures. They missed a few in later years because of neglect or clerical error, but such cases were certainly not symptomatic of overall indifference.

Incidentally, Roan released Sins of the Children on DVD several years ago, probably assuming that it was public domain because the title does not appear in the copyright registry. Actually, MGM registered it under its preliminary title "The Richest Man in the World" and renewed it in 1958, so it was in fact a protected title.

-Harold

Just a pedantic point of clarification--the copyright lapse on TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY did make the papers in the summer of 1976, but not in the form of "national headlines". A syndicated columnist by the name of Robin Adams Sloan has a paragraph about it ("Why is the lion whining instead of roaring...?"), and Tom Dunnahoo of Thunderbird Films is quoted about it in a piece about piracy by one Dick Kleiner.

Brooksie wrote: happened to watch `Till The Clouds Roll By' (1946) the other day and was thinking how depressing it is that during the dread Kerkorkian era, MGM simply ceased defending its copyright and allowed it to lapse into PD.

Richard P. May wrote:There were several MGM features of that period where the studio failed to renew the copyright. At that time, it was a case of renew during the 28th year after registration, or it goes out of copyright.
This appears to be more a case of some sloppiness in the legal department than anything else. No point trying to blame it on the majority stockholder, who probably had no idea this was happening.

Its not an MGM film, but it is my favorite example of a "copyright lapse:"
In 1976 at a film class at Penn State, our prof (grad student I think) began the class by telling us we would be watching a little-known film by a well-known director (whose films we had been watching the previous couple of classes).

He asked the class of about a hundred students how many of us had seen this particular film before? One raised his hand. How many have heard of it? I had (on the Richard Schickel "Men Who Made the Movies" doc on PBS a few years before), as had a couple of other students. He explained that the film, made 1946 (or copyrighted that year), had been allowed to lapse (as of 1974), and was now in the public domain. We watched the film (over a period of consecutive nights, I think), and when it was over, it was the first time I ever saw an audience give a standing ovation to a movie.

The film? "It's a Wonderful Life." So few even knew of it then, and now, since it became PD, almost no one has NOT seen it on television. In fact, its rather hard to avoid each December.

Ian Elliot wrote:Just a pedantic point of clarification--the copyright lapse on TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY did make the papers in the summer of 1976, but not in the form of "national headlines". A syndicated columnist by the name of Robin Adams Sloan has a paragraph about it ("Why is the lion whining instead of roaring...?"), and Tom Dunnahoo of Thunderbird Films is quoted about it in a piece about piracy by one Dick Kleiner.

Well, that was essentially the question I was asking - did it really make `national headlines' or not? I guess it didn't, which is not surprising. All the sources I consulted seemed insistent on 1973 rather than 1976 as the year this occurred, though.

Sorry, I'm no expert and I didn't mean my inane comment there as a definitive answer to the query, but I don't see any mention in papers posted online of a copyright issue on this film until 1976, and then just marginal. (Wouldn't the original term have ended in 1974?)

Perhaps other members can confirm or refute, but I think the mid-seventies was a flashpoint in film anti-piracy law enforcement in the U.S., with a spike in the number of raids and crackdowns, some of which received tons of media attention (I remember as a boy hearing about the FBI visiting Roddy McDowall to seize some allegedly illegal holdings, and seeing a confessed former bootlegger interviewed on 60 MINUTES).

This could be the reason a rights issue on decades-old MGM feature would get some ink in 1976. And of course THAT`S ENTERTAINMENT had just given the MGM musicals considerable currency.

Sorry if it sounded like I was being abrupt, it wasn't intended!

Possibly the publicity in 1976 was due to the legal case the film companies launched against the manufacturers of the videocasette recorder, claiming that taping a film off broadcast would be infringing on their copyright?

It's not surprising that MGM was subject to some lazy mistakes in the early 70s. This was the period where Kirk Kerkorian was openly proclaiming that his main interest in the company was the use of its name for the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas.

Back to the main topic - there is some info about researching the copyright status of (an American) work at http://chart.copyrightdata.com/ch17.html, which just convinces me exactly how confusing it all is ...

An earlier poster mentioned the film IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946).

This is an example of a formerly PD title that BECAME re-copyrighted! The way I understand the story is a person or company bought the story rights and went to Federal Court and a judge decided that all derivative renderings of this story became the intellectual property of the new literary owner.

This title no longer shows up on reliable PD film lists, and theatrical and home video rights are through Paramount Pictures.

Marr&Colton wrote:An earlier poster mentioned the film IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946).

This is an example of a formerly PD title that BECAME re-copyrighted! The way I understand the story is a person or company bought the story rights and went to Federal Court and a judge decided that all derivative renderings of this story became the intellectual property of the new literary owner.

This title no longer shows up on reliable PD film lists, and theatrical and home video rights are through Paramount Pictures.

Can you show us the court ruling? It's been my belief that IAWL is still PD but if you try to do anything with it, you will be bullied by Paramount lawyers. A ruling like that would seem to me to be unconstitutional.

What's to stop me from buying the story rights to The Godfather from the author's estate and claim ownership of that film?

"Republic regained control of the lucrative property in 1993 by flexing a new Supreme Court ruling that determined that the holder of a copyright to a story from which a movie was made had certain property rights over the movie itself. Since Republic still owned the copyrighted story behind It's a Wonderful Life and had also purchased exclusive rights to the movie's copyrighted music, it was able to essentially yank the movie out of the public domain: It claimed that since Wonderful Life relied on these copyrighted works, the film could no longer be shown without the studio's blessing. (Technically, the film itself is not copyrighted. One could hypothetically replace the music, rearrange the footage, and sell or show the new product--but no one has done this.)"

http://www.slate.com/id/1004242/

Lack of money.

Bob

ColemanShedman wrote:"Republic regained control of the lucrative property in 1993 by flexing a new Supreme Court ruling that determined that the holder of a copyright to a story from which a movie was made had certain property rights over the movie itself. Since Republic still owned the copyrighted story behind It's a Wonderful Life and had also purchased exclusive rights to the movie's copyrighted music, it was able to essentially yank the movie out of the public domain: It claimed that since Wonderful Life relied on these copyrighted works, the film could no longer be shown without the studio's blessing. (Technically, the film itself is not copyrighted. One could hypothetically replace the music, rearrange the footage, and sell or show the new product--but no one has done this.)"

http://www.slate.com/id/1004242/

See, that's a load of crap. The story and song owners gave the producers the rights to use those when the film was made. Unless there's something in the contract having the rights reverting to the original owners after a period of time, the original owners should have no control over the film. Does the Peter Benchley estate have any control over the film "Jaws"? Can they tell Universal what to do with it?

No, most studio contracts are written so that songs, story ideas, and even the very scripts, are owned in perpetuity by the studio after they buy it. The author has no right to complain about how the material was used, developed, etc., because the studio now owns it. The only works that can be made freely are those that are pd, such as Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare, etc.

A good resource for everything copyright online:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/" target="_blank