Quote:
Originally Posted by julie_m
The Public Domain does exist in the UK; Copyright is merely a sweetener to encourage people to contribute works to it. However, the duration of copyright protection in the UK was historically longer than in the USA.
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Probably in a different context?
For example a television drama anthology series made in the UK was discovered a while back called " The Errol Flynn Theatre" made in the 1950s, attempts to find the copyright owner by those who have found the prints have proved fruitless, as obviously everyone associated with this is probably dead and rights ownership was probably never sold on to a big distributor in the light of Errol Flynn's own death...so they remain in limbo as they cannot be shown in the UK because of copyright protection.
Now in the US a similar situation arose with a show called 'One Step Beyond' they could not find a copyright owner (or someone who later bought the rights) so this has gone into public domain and anybody can do what they like with it, until a distributor comes along and offers the gov some dosh to renew the copyright protection.