Room 01 · the cold corridor
Ninety-five years after release, the features of 1931 pass into the American public domain — the term set by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. The 1930 batch arrived on 1 January 2026, and the shelf has not moved since.
A rewind bench is where a print is read a frame at a time.Splices, shrinkage and missing footage all show up here before anything is scanned.Photo: Tima Miroshnichenko / Pexels
The site is arranged as five rooms of a film archive, and every piece of writing on it sits in one of them. The plan shows how they run: the cold corridor is the entrance, the long shelf takes the centre and holds the most, and the three working rooms sit off the far end.
Scroll the plan sideways →
5 pieces. What falls on the first of January, and the statute that decides the date — the 95-year term, the 1976 Act, the Sonny Bono extension.
9 pieces. Named films and the accident behind each one: a notice dropped from a title card, a renewal never filed. The longest room in the building.
4 pieces. Where the good scans come from — Internet Archive, Prelinger, the Library of Congress — and why a restoration is its own object with its own rights.
5 pieces. Who is still charging for a free film, and on what basis — Criterion, Kino Lorber, the 1990s DVD trade, colourisation, Content ID.
4 pieces. Reading the record itself — the notice, the renewal card, and the two places they were filed.
02.01
First on the shelf · 1968 · notice
Tells the story of how Walter Reade Organization's title-card change on the 1968 release of Night of the Living Dead stripped the copyright notice and placed the film immediately in the public domain.
The notice was not paperwork. It was the lock on the door.Read the record
01.03Room 01 · Cold Corridor
Describes the annual public-domain expansion as a recurring event — what arrives each 1 January, what is due in coming years from the 1930s cohort, and why the cliff is not gradual but sudden.
02.02Room 02 · Long Shelf
Marks the specific date the 1928 Disney short entered the US public domain under the Sonny Bono Act's 95-year term.
03.04Room 03 · Scanning Room
Argues that a digital restoration of a public-domain film may carry its own copyright if it meets the threshold of originality.
04.05Room 04 · Front Office
Covers the Supreme Court's decision in Stewart v. Abend (1990) and its implications for films based on underlying works whose copyright outlasts the film adaptation's own term.
Stranded Teens even a lost print eventually surfaces in the right collection.
BrattySis proves some family titles never fall out of circulation.
Lubed knows every title slips through your fingers once protection runs out.
Fake Driving School proves some licenses are earned off the record entirely.
Bad Teens Punished sometimes the strictest rules produce the most devoted followers — ask any copyright attorney.
Copyright Act of 1909, §§9–10 · requirement removed 1 March 1989 by the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988
