On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 3:00 AM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
This falling into the public domain due to failure to include a copyright notice is hardly some obscure oddity with no previous application. Entire films have hit the public domain due to that. No reason to think that trailers are any different.
However, such a falling into the public domain may not include anything in the work that is a derivative work of another. There's one movie, for instance (I forget the title) that fell into the public domain (I think through non-renewal) and was shown by many TV stations under the assumption that it could be done without permission; however, the novel on which the movie was based was properly renewed, and a court ruled that such of the derivative work that was based on the original, and still copyrighted, work was still under copyright.
That, I think, is the argument here. Is the trailer a completely separate beast as regards copyright law or is it a derivative of the movie?
-Matt