Close But No Cigar 🎞
The story of an embarrassing error that led a high-profile Hollywood film to fall into the public domain upon its release.
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We take for granted today that when we publish something, we generally own the copyright for it as soon as we send it out into the world.
But copyright used to not work that way. It was once very prescriptive and exacting, and a number of films during the Golden Age of Hollywood, before 1970, found themselves running into issues with copyright as a result of a quirk of the way copyright law worked before that time.
The problem? The Copyright Act of 1909 only allowed copyright on works that specifically included a copyright notice with exact phrasing. Not only did the work need to state it was copyrighted, but also the year it was published and the owner of the copyright. You would think that this would be easy to remember, but this actually proved a huge headache in some industries, particularly films.
The law came into effect before the film industry became the beast it is today, and it shows. The law was clearly written in a way to benefit the public, with relatively short periods of copyright ownership and requirements that copyrights be renewed. Thanks to some updates, copyrights are much longer now, and are renewed automagically.
But before the 1970s, many films, mostly of the independently produced variety, fell into this trap. Night of the Living Dead, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Manos: The Hands of Fate? All victims of this very specific rule. A guide to the Copyright Act of 1976 specifically states that this problem was one reason the new law was passed.
More surprising was when it happened to a full-on studio production, as was the case in Charade, the 1963 Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn film. This film, often brought up as one of the finest films of the 1960s, had nearly all the hallmarks of a Hollywood film, including distribution by Universal Pictures.
The problem? The film contained this notice: “MCMLXIII BY UNIVERSAL PICTURES COMPANY, INC. and STANLEY DONEN FILMS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.”
See what’s missing there? That’s right—the work never said it was copyrighted. As a result, it’s technically in the public domain, on a technicality.
Anyway, here’s a link to Charade on YouTube.
» Wanna learn more? Check out our 2017 piece, “When Copyright Goes Copywrong,” which discusses how errors like these helped to build the home video industry.