On 9/8/08, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
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.
The one you're thinking of is the Christmas classic "It's a Wonderful Life", which was a movie adaptation of the story "The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern.
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?
I may be misremembering but I thought that film trailers are normally copyrighted, but that the copyright owner licences use in any context in order to promote the film.