legal action against suspiria remake

[rxfiend]

From what I've ready, NOTLD isn't in PD. It's just assumed it is.

[Jeremy]

Night of the Living Dead is in public domain. Under American copyright law at the time, a creative work needed to have a copyright notice affixed to it in order for protection to be granted, and that's exactly what the original theatrical distributor forgot to do when they changed the title (original title was Night of the Flesheaters). The same thing happened to several major films like Charade and McLintock, which slipped into the public domain.

However, there are a few horror films out there which are widely assumed to be in public domain (in particular, Godzilla vs. Megalon and The Satanic Rites of Dracula) which really are copyrighted.

[X-human]

Originally Posted by Jeremy

Night of the Living Dead is in public domain. Under American copyright law at the time, a creative work needed to have a copyright notice affixed to it in order for protection to be granted, and that's exactly what the original theatrical distributor forgot to do when they changed the title (original title was Night of the Flesheaters). The same thing happened to several major films like Charade and McLintock, which slipped into the public domain.

Just to clarify, NOTLD itself is not in the public domain, just the film prints that don't have the copyright notice. Any film print of NOTLD with the copy right on it is not in the public domain.

This is why I seriously doubt the 3D remake has any leg to stand on, the intellectual property of NOTLD is still Romero/Russo's. This is probably why a few theatrical showings were done but no real distribution has taken place.