> 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.
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.
Never have I been so torn on my opinion of whether or not this was truly “unfortunate”.
Here in SoCal, our past senator cosponsored the DMCA (aka Disney Millennium Copyright Act) to benefit her long time contributor.
Once authors are dead, works should enter public domain.
The "industry" has pushed back this basic principle for many years.
I often say, the only reason "classical music" is even a known thing is because it's not subject to copyright, and orchestras can perform it royalty free.
There will be no such thing with modern media...
M I C K E Y, M O U S E
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See: MST3K and RiffTrax
