Chaos Magnet

Night of the Living Dead in the public domain

Talk about a mistake. Upon seeing that George A. Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead was listed as being in the public domain on the Internet Movie Archive (where a full download is now available!) I did some checking around to see if someone wasn't playing a really bad joke. According to Boing Boing,

Travis, a member of the BoingBoing tribe on Tribe.net, says: " Before 1978, any copyrighted work had to have a copyright notice on every distribution, otherwise it wasn't considered copyrighted. George A. Romero mistakenly left out the copyright notice when he distributed his 1968 film NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The copyright has not recently "lapsed," but was in fact never enforcable, which is why we have dozens of "pirate" distributions of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and innumerable knock-offs."

Ooooo, now this is cool.

Technorati tags: Night of the Living Dead | Public Domain |

src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/ChaosMagnet?i=http://www.chaosmagnet.com/blog/archives/000379.html" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">