[flomo]

Since it is the holiday season, reminds me of "It’s a Wonderful Life", which everyone thought was in the public domain, and it became a christmas tradition because it was all over the place. Well, eventually they dug up a copyright on some of the soundtrack.

[Mountain_Skies]

That's an interesting angle. Wonder if that part of the movie could be rescored with something in the public domain so the rescored version could be distributed freely. It also reminds of the Commodore 64 game for 'Blade Runner' which was oddly stated to have been inspired by the soundtrack rather than by the movie itself. I've seen claims that they couldn't get a license to do a video game based on the movie, so being inspired by the soundtrack was a workaround. That never seemed legally grounded to me but copyright, especially the components of musical performances, gets really strange sometimes.

[emodendroket]

I mean yeah that would certainly be possible.

[flomo]

Thinking about it, there's just no business model in rescoring "It's a Wonderful Life". You want to get into a pricewar with a studio?

Anyway, hollywood hated this situation and was glad to see it under control. The issue is now viewing is pretty limited. NBC made it a prime time event.

(Mentioning some commodoretard's 'theory' on copyright detracts from your post, imo. They just didn't bother going after him)

[abirch]

It's a Wonderful Life the movie is in the public domain: https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2017/12/its-a-wonderful-life... the book which it was based on isn't nor its soundtrack as you mention.

IANAL but could someone produce a public domain version of this movie with a public domain soundtrack?

[zozbot234]

The copyright status of the original book makes that problematic. You'd have to somehow alter the recorded movie so that it doesn't reflect the creative content of the book anymore, which doesn't make much sense.