[wodenokoto]

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.

[sumtechguy]

> 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]

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]

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.

[cobbzilla]

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.

[kmoser]

> 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]

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)

[kmoser]

But the original was registered at the time. My question is why the re-release under a different title didn't retain copyright since the only thing that changed was the title.

[sidewndr46]

This is not the case. If registration were required in the US, 99.999999% of software ever written would be effectively public domain.

[toast0]

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)

[cobbzilla]

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.

[sidewndr46]

If copyright applies only to my published works, this would mean as long as you steal my laptop you now own the works on it. I'm certainly not publishing my diaries on the internet.

This has not been true for a very long time.

[graemep]

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.