Poster / reprint copyright query

[John Longstaff]

Hi,
As an addition to a small antique / craft furniture and interiors business I'd like to offer and sell framed reprints of classic 20th century movie posters / advertising / magazine covers. Plenty of online shops do this but I'm very nervous not to contravene any copyright laws.

As I say, i've found plenty of big and very visible online poster companies that reprint and sell exactly these products so there must be a way to do it. WIll they have gained permission from the hundreds of rights owners or have they (and can I) just crack on?

I'd appreciate any help in this area.

Many thanks in advance!

 

[The Byre]

The rights will almost certainly rest with the original distributors of that movie or of course their heirs in those cases where companies have been sold to the likes of Vivendi, Disney, etc. My experience of these companies is that they always default to the 'No!' response. That is, unless of course, the originals are so old that the copyright has expired.

They do this because they can't be bothered to find out the ins and outs of ownership, value and a thousand other questions around any intellectual property that may or may not be theirs. Establishing ownership of what was then baksheesh marketing material that may have originally been made copyright free (or maybe not!) would cost them thousands, so they just say 'No!' to every request.

So my uninformed guess is that these on-line Johnies are just winging it and the copyright owners don't care enough to chase them. In nearly all cases, the distributors never bothered to renew the copyright of the posters anyway.

One thing to watch out for, if you find something that is out of copyright, you cannot copy a copy, for the simple reason that the copy will be under copyright. A typical and well-known issue is with music. You find a song from waaay back that is long out of copyright, but you do not have the original 78, only the reworked copy on CD or on-line somewhere. The intellectual copyright (tune and words) may be public domain, but the mechanical reworking (i.e. the sounds) of that reworked recording belong to the issuing company or person.

Reworked copies of any posters, songs, movies, or any other artwork, are nearly always watermarked.

For that reason, you must always copy the original and never a copy!

Please note that a missing copyright notice in the UK does not make a work PD. Also some works are only PD in theory - e.g. the copyright for 'It's a Wonderful Life' did indeed lapse in '79 but as it is a derivative work (based on a novel) the intellectual rights to the story are very much active. Also the owners managed to buy up every original print, so every available copy today has a fresh mechanical copyright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_domain_in_the_United_States

 

[John Longstaff]

Many thanks - a very generous response and you offer some useful guidance. On investigation, some current resellers are clearly 'winging' it but there are some long standing players in the space there too. Some are correctly referencing Copyright ownerships. I'm happy to pay any licence fee (within reason of course!) ... a bit more exploratory work needed.

 

[ava30]

Most likely the posters you are talking about are authored. They can be inspired by some pattern. There is also the possibility that they have been licensed to distribute them, for example, from sites such as Fotolia. Another possibility is that posters are made under the creative commons license.

 

[Awinner2]

Have a look at PatentPrints on etsy.com They sell prints from public domain patents. Potential to buy and resell without copyright issues?