Checking Copyright

[Touti]

How do you check if a movie is still under copyright protection.  Following Pete's "Help with classic movies" thread, I've checked around on internet and found sites whete they ship you home made copoes for just the price of shipping.  For just 10$, you get 20 classic movies, dubbed from original VHS releases or 16mm films or recorded form TV.

How can one check if those movies are still protected ?

[addicted2dvd]

I am afraid I have no idea how you tell when something slips into the Public Domain. Would be good to know though. almost positive all 40 in that boxset I have though... and there is some big stars in some of those movies so far... Humphrey Bogart... Doris Day.. Abbott & Costello.... Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin... Orson Wells.... Loretta Young. just to name a few... so needless to say I am looking forward to this weekend. 

[Touti]

Your box set may be perfectly legal.  It's this I was wondering about

[addicted2dvd]

hard to say... this public domain stuff I was never able to figure out. but there must be some place you can check to see what falls under public domain.

[Halo2]

I found this site.

http://pdmdb.org

[SailorRipley]

This one is a good resource, I use it all the time: http://www.archive.org/details/movies

Beware though, that 90% of all public domain titles are in REALLY bad shape, since no one is claiming ownership there is no income, so nobody sees the point in having a remastered copy. There are a few public domain titles picked up by Criterion that get the deluxe treatment, but most are sadly in terribly condition.

[addicted2dvd]

Absolutely... I have several public domain discs... and they can look pretty awful... but there has been some to surprise me... not look great... but better then I expected.

[James]

I picked up another version of Two Women yesterday. Awful transfer, as expected. At least this copy is in Italian with English subs. I mistakenly picked up an English dubbed version previously. So not only was it crap quality and cropped but Sophia Loren didn't have Sophia Loren's voice.  That was more than I could stand. So now I have crap quality and cropped with subtitles. 

It's interesting how they chop off the beginning studio credits so you can't even tell who the original production companies were. The copyright notice was so small that the blurry transfer obliterated it.

DVD Beaver favors an R2 release but unfortunately it doesn't have subtitles and I don't speak Italian. 

Needless to say, if there's ever an official release of this, I'll be all over it.  If Criterion could release it...