Quote:
Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel
excellent ! i was just wondering to myself how public domain works for films, and whether there were some kind of database for them like gutenberg for books. maybe we could start with a pd one, so we can be sure everyone can get it ?
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I will be honest, I don't know the copyright laws for collaborative works as well as I do for straight author works.
In the US., up till 1976, the same copyright law applied for collaborative works (i.e. movies, orchestra recordings) as did for individual copyright. That was 28 years, extendable once for a maximum of 56 years. Each work had to have a separate extension applied for. As with every bureaucratic organization, somtimes things slipped through the cracks. All the P.D. titles you see are movies/shorts that somehow not renewed properly and fell into the public domain. 1978 (when the 1976 law went into effect) - 56 = 1922. So everthing before 1922 went into public domain. When the latest extension went into effect (I believe) the was a year slippage, so the P.D. date slid to 1923.
This is why Hollywood (genericly - although certain movie houses have been more agressive than others) is always pushing copyright extension. Talkies came into existance in the US in 1929. Hollywood will lobby, cajole, bribe, threaten, whatever it takes, to keep the talkies from ever going public domain
en masse.
I'm not familar with the Berne convention for collaborative works, you'll have to check it out. How ever Great Britain only allows 50 years for a performance copyright. (Harry T is more knowedgeable on that than I am). Which means any recording made before 1958 today is P.D. for the
recording. So,
for music no under a writer's copyrigth, you could have free downloads in Great Britain. Example, Beehtoven'd works are P.D. so a recording released in Britain of Beehtoven's Symphonies in 1958 would be P.D., while a recording of Cliff Richards from 1958, while the performance is P.D., the songs recorded would not be, so the results are not P.D.
Got to tend to business, back in a while.