On 4/3/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
This is the problem with the "PD" movies you sometimes see circulating on the net.. The movie lost its copyright (through lack of registration, lack of renewal, etc) but it contains music, photographs, and an underlying story which were all renewed and are still enforceable and enforced.
All of which makes them better sources for stills than moving images - if the copyright in the movie itself is expired, a still from the movie cannot infringe upon music, is unlikely to infringe upon story, and can be checked for such copyrightable elements as photographs.
This leads me to another question. In pre-Berne US copyright law (1923-1960something), if a photograph has no independent copyright registration, I believe that its copyright term would be based on the copyright of the work in which it is published. If, however, a photograph without independent registration has been published in two different books - what happens if one of those books falls out of copyright through non-renewal, and the other does not?
Is it based on the copyright status of the book you copied it from? Is it based on the copyright status of the first book in which it was published (IOW, its first copyright registration)? Is it still copyrighted if any of the published versions are still in copyright? (a version I think is least likely)
I've never found anything useful about this situation in copyright guides.
-Matt