Metropolis

You need to read Jonathan Bailey’s article, “Copyright and Metropolis,” in Plagiarism Today, 19 October 2016. Excellent article, but it does have a few huge mistakes. Bailey explains that, for some reason, Metropolis in the US was registered as a 1925 copyright. Rubbish. Metropolis was copyrighted on 9 July 1927, registration number A 998689. Casting further doubt upon Bailey’s narrative is his preposterous claim that Metropolis “premiered in the U.S. on March 31, 1933, nearly two years after its German publication.” The copyright was good for 28 calendar years, 1927 through 1954, upon which it would need to be renewed, but it was not renewed. Why? Well, Paramount’s rights to the film had lapsed and the studio had returned all its materials to Ufa in Germany. There was nobody around to renew the US copyright. So, Metropolis fell into the public domain on 1 January 1955, not 1953. (Its copyright in the rest of the world remains in force, and the copyrights to the restorations, reconstructions, digital cleanings, and accompaniments remain in force even in the US, of course.)

German films had not been too popular in the first half of the 1940’s, but once the dust of WWII began to settle, though, attitudes changed, and, as we saw above, Metropolis was reissued in Great Britain and in Australia.