I may have posted about this before, but a new development has cropped up, so here we go again:
I am very confused about the copyright status of the movie "Carnival of Souls."
It would appear that it was released without a copyright notice which, in 1962, would've been required to maintain the copyright.
Wikipedia, confusingly, has the film uploaded *twice* on its article on the film, one upload in high definition and the other in potato quality. The high def upload cites the film as being in the public domain due to failure of renewal, the potato quality upload cites it being in the public domain due to lack of copyright notice.
The film's director and writer, Herk Harvey and John Clifford, re-released a version with some cut scenes re-inserted circa 1989 which I presume is still under copyright, but more strikingly, in or around 1996, Clifford apparently registered a copyright on the original screenplay, and then sold the rights to two other men, Matthew Irvine and Peter Sobey.
According to an interview with Irvine on a film blog circa 2016, he claims that the original creators believed the film to be in the public domain but they did a chain-of-title search which established their ownership of the film and this allowed the sale of the film to Irvine and Sobey.
I have no idea how a chain-of-title search could apply to a copyright that lapsed due to lack of notice on a 1962 film.
I was also under the impression that a screenplay, if adapted fairly faithfully, is considered "published" once a film is released based on it, so holding it back until 1996 and *then* registering a separate copyright on it seems like it would be invalid.
More recently, Peter Sobey has been editing the film's Wikipedia article to assert his and Irvine's ownership claims. He apparently licensed the film for a perfume (!) and linked to an article about it to cite his claims to ownership; that article notes that the perfume-maker was contacted by him after they referenced the film and he had a google alert set for the film's title. So clearly they're keeping an eye out for adaptations and the like, though, curiously, they don't seem to have attempted to get the uploads of the film removed from Wikipedia.
I'm curious if anyone with any expertise on #copyright law and the #publicdomain more specifically might have an explanation for all of this! Heck, if any film historians familiar with #CarnivalOfSouls have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.
