No permission is required for the following reasons:
A search was conducted through the U.S. Copyright Office
public catalog
, and there is
NO
record that this was subsequently registered within 5 years of publication. As such, the opportunity for copyright protection on the photo was forfeited and it entered the public domain.
The source images linked above are mechanical scans of the underlying public domain work. These scans are faithful reproductions of the photograph that do not meet the
threshold of originality
necessary to assert a copyright interest.
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
This image is in the
public domain
because it is a mere mechanical scan or photocopy of a public domain original, or – from the available evidence – is so similar to such a scan or photocopy that no copyright protection can be expected to arise. The original itself is in the public domain for the following reason:
Public domain
Public domain
false
false
This work is in the
public domain
because it was published in the United States between 1978 and March 1, 1989 without a
copyright notice
, and its
copyright was not subsequently
registered
with the U.S. Copyright Office within 5 years
. Unless its author has been dead for several years, it is
copyrighted
in the countries or areas that do not apply the
rule of the shorter term
for US works, such as Canada (50 pma), Mainland China (50 pma, not Hong Kong or Macau), Germany (70 pma), Mexico (100 pma), Switzerland (70 pma), and other countries with individual treaties. See
this page
for further explanation.
This tag is designed for use where there may be a need to assert that any enhancements (eg brightness, contrast, colour-matching, sharpening) are in themselves insufficiently creative to generate a new copyright. It can be used where it is unknown whether any enhancements have been made, as well as when the enhancements are clear but insufficient. For known raw unenhanced scans you can use an appropriate
{{PD-old}}
tag instead. For usage, see
Commons:When to use the PD-scan tag
.