I have a copyright/public domain question.
I have been doing a lot of research on Public Domain works, and have
found a large list of films made AFTER the 1922 cutoff that have
fallen into the public domain on sites such as
http://www.archive.org/movies/movies.php
and http://www.retrofilm.com
What I am wondering is: when a movie, audio-dramatization or play
based on a copyrighted work falls out of copyright, how does that
affect the original work? For example, the movie version of A
Farewell to Arms, starring Gary Cooper & Helen Hayes, was released in 1932, but the
copyright was (apparently) not renewed so it is currently in the
Public Domain (listed on Retrofilm.com as PD):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022879/
HOWEVER, the book A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway was written
in 1929 (7 years past the 1922 public domain cutoff) and assuming that
ITS' copyright was renewed, would presumably still be in control of the estate of
Ernest Hemmingway.
BUT, since the film is NOW in the public domain, isn't that a bit of a
catch-22? Specifically:
1) Could you legally copy down the lines and sell the script?
2) Could you make a flash animation and use the movie soundtrack as your own?
3) Can you legally burn DVDs of the movie and resell them?
4) Could you make a modern movie and claim that it was based on that
movie (and not the book)?
In my thinking, the original work itself is still copyrighted, but
when they signed over the rights for a movie to be made, they lost
some protection (since it was up to the moviemakers to renew down the
road, which they apparently did not). So I would think that 1-3 are
all legal, and #4 might even be supportable.
I was going to send this question to somebody like pro-creative
commons sci-fi author Cory Doctrow or public domain lawyer guru
Lawrence Lessig, but they seem like busy men, so I thought I'd pay to
post it here. |
