English: This is a publicity still taken and publicly distributed to promote the subject or a work relating to the subject.
As stated by film production expert Eve Light Honathaner in The Complete Film Production Handbook (Focal Press, 2001, p. 211.): "Publicity photos (star headshots) have traditionally not been copyrighted. Since they are disseminated to the public, they are generally considered public domain, and therefore clearance by the studio that produced them is not necessary."
Nancy Wolff, in The Professional Photographer's Legal Handbook (Allworth Communications, 2007, p. 55.), notes: "There is a vast body of photographs, including but not limited to publicity stills, that have no notice as to who may have created them."
Film industry author Gerald Mast, in Film Study and the Copyright Law (1989, p. 87), writes: "According to the old copyright act, such production stills were not automatically copyrighted as part of the film and required separate copyrights as photographic stills. The new copyright act similarly excludes the production still from automatic copyright but gives the film's copyright owner a five-year period in which to copyright the stills. Most studios have never bothered to copyright these stills because they were happy to see them pass into the public domain, to be used by as many people in as many publications as possible."
Kristin Thompson, committee chairperson of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies writes in the conclusion of a 1993 conference of cinema scholars and editors[1], that: "[The conference] expressed the opinion that it is not necessary for authors to request permission to reproduce frame enlargements... [and] some trade presses that publish educational and scholarly film books also take the position that permission is not necessary for reproducing frame enlargements and publicity photographs."
Licensing
The original promotional photograph included a defective copyright notice, which omitted the year and therefore invalidated the opportunity for copyright protection.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse
This work is in the public domain because it was published in the United States between 1929 and 1977, inclusive, with a defective copyright notice (copyright notice information) containing at least one of the following defects:
Notice is dated more than one year later than the actual date of first publication;
Notice does not include a named claimant or does not name the actual copyright holder;
Notice is illegible or concealed from view;
It is a printed literary, musical, or dramatic work that does not include the year.
A defective notice does not invalidate copyright in cases where the error is immaterial and would not mislead an infringer, such as an abbreviated name. Additionally, foreign works created outside the US are subject to copyright restoration even with a defective notice. It is not in the public domain in the countries or areas that do not apply the rule of the shorter term for US works, such as Canada, mainland China (not Hong Kong or Macao), Germany, Mexico, Switzerland, and other countries with individual treaties.