JamesT wrote:
We did that for our first movie night! We all fell in love with Rotwang.
Damn, I just registered this week. Looks like I missed it. I have the DVD and I was looking for an excuse to re-watch it, but I guess I can still do that, and maybe make it a double feature along with the 2001 anime.
Funny thing about the public domain. According to wikipedia:
The American copyright had lapsed in 1953, which eventually led to a proliferation of versions being released on video. Along with other foreign-made works, the film's U.S. copyright was restored in 1998, but the constitutionality of this copyright extension was challenged in Golan v. Gonzales and as Golan v. Holder it was ruled that "In the United States, that body of law includes the bedrock principle that works in the public domain remain in the public domain. Removing works from the public domain violated Plaintiffs' vested First Amendment interests." This only applied to the rights of so-called reliance parties, i.e. parties who had previously relied on the public domain status of restored works. The case was overturned on appeal to the Tenth Circuit and that decision was upheld by the US Supreme Court on January 18, 2012. This had the effect of restoring the copyright in the work as of January 1, 1996. Under current US copyright law, it remains copyrighted until January 1, 2023.
As far as I know, this doesn't apply outside the US, so if you run into trouble with the RIAA because of that, just say you all went to watch it on a boat in international waters.