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Thursday, May 18th, 2023

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Images from a public domain film. Are they also in the public domain?

Hi! If a movie is in the public domain, would the images that can be seen on its IMDb file also be in the public domain? For example, the movie posters.

Thank you so much!

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3 years ago

If they were all copyrighted around the same time in the same jurisdiction, then most likely the copyrights all expired around the same time, but in the copyright law of many nations, there is a renewal process that could involve making discordant mistakes. Also, when copyright is transferred, it may not include every constituent part of a collection of works belonging to the same particular production, meaning that some of copyright holders may care for the copyright with not necessarily the same level of diligence. Anyway, the answer to this question isn't really known to be the specialty of anybody around here this forum.

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3 years ago

IMDb seems give contributors the benefit of the doubt many a time in regards to image uploads, but for each contribution of that type, the contributor is really supposed to know ahead of time, whether or not he/she has the authority or distribute copies of an unaltered work that falls under the protection of useful art or of scientific progress. When it comes to posters, there is maybe a sort of implicit license for anybody to distribute without alteration. To avoid complaints, though, it may not be wise to distribute such things in an electronic resolution/scale so large as to come close to the original resolution/scale.

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3 years ago

Hi! Thank you for your answers jeorj_euler. I was referring to taking images already published by other users in the images section of the film's tab on IMDB. Regarding the resolution, it would be a small size since it would be to make custom thumbnails for YouTube. I can upload the movie without any problem, I don't get any restrictions, but I want to know if I would commit an infringement if I make a custom thumbnail with a movie poster instead of a movie scene.

Thank you very much!

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The images don't belong to IMDb, so the company itself can neither grant permission to copy them nor complain about them being copied. (Likely there is also no inherent mechanical copyright shared with the actual copyright holder.) We might be able to infer without certainty that IMDb would prefer that visitors not download the images, whenever the IMDb web pages upon which the images appear have disabled the use of the context menu (the little menu that appears when clicking the rightmost mouse button). Technically the images are downloaded and kept in the form of cache (possibly on the site visitor's device's hard drive for an indeterminate amount of time), just by viewing them in a web browser, but that doesn't necessarily imply the license of the site visitor to distribute them. So, ultimately, the key would be to check with the actual copyright holder, unless doing so is unnecessary or a fair use rationale is being applied. Just to note, the Amazon/IMDb company can probably tell if a copy of an image found anywhere on the web is an byte-for-byte copy of a file that was at one time or another hosted on Amazon's content delivery network (CDN), the Amazon Web Services (AWS), but the company ought not care about that. Unless mass harvesting is afoot, there is no threat to the company's business model.