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Comment by cobbzilla | Hacker News Reader

It wasn’t a relicense, the copyright was never validly filed (date was missing), so the copyright was never registered. Only registered copyrights can be enforced in the US. No registration, no enforcement rights. Or at least that’s my layman’s understanding, happy to be corrected.

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> This error occurred after the film's title was changed from its original moniker Night of the Flesh Eaters. Prints with that title contained the copyright notice, but when new prints were created using the title Night of the Living Dead, the copyright notice was forgotten.

This begs the question: if the original movie was copyrighted, how does releasing the same movie with a different title make the new re-release considered a new (not-yet-copyrighted) work? I thought the copyright protection of the original would extend to the renamed version, since they're 99.99% the same. Theoretically, does changing even one frame necessitate a new copyright?

Remember we need to talk about law as it existed back when this happened not the law today. Back then you didn't get copyright protection unless you registered with the copyright office (and a few other things that I'm not quite sure of - none relevant to the law today). So the copyright was never registered, likely because the distributor was expected to register it and they failed to do their job. There might be a lawsuit against the distributor for breach of contract, but it wouldn't be a copyright lawsuit.

Today things are much easier, if you create something it is copyright. If you want to sue you need to register, but you can register at anytime. If you register you can sue for triple damages for anything that happens after you register, but you can still get damages for things that happened before your register. (The above is my understanding of the law, but I'm not a lawyer)

But the original was registered at the time. My question is why the re-release under a different title didn't retain copyright since the only thing that changed was the title.

This is not the case. If registration were required in the US, 99.999999% of software ever written would be effectively public domain.

99.9999999% of software written is not published, it’s covered by trade secret law. Copyright only applies to published works. Look into what happens legally when source code is leaked and published.

its covered by trade secret and copyright.

Software can simultaneously be covered by copyright, trade secret and patents. The patents have to disclose some info, of course.

Even when distributed you can distribute just the binary, and keep the source a trade secret.

If copyright applies only to my published works, this would mean as long as you steal my laptop you now own the works on it. I'm certainly not publishing my diaries on the internet.

This has not been true for a very long time.

The copyright rules have changed. Registration and a proper notice was required when this film was published.

Now, fixing a creative work in a tangible medium is all that's required. When does the copyright expire? Nobody will know, because there's no year of publication listed, and no author listed to find out when they die. (Even if there is an author listed by name, maybe it was me; maybe it was the Pulitzer Prize winning author)

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