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This image of a Tin Woodsman seems to be related to the film. I believe it should be in the public domain already since the paper at large it is in lacks a physical copyright notice. There are individual notices within the paper, but not on this image. The difficulty is in determining if Ted Eshbaugh drew it or if it was by the author of the column. SDudley (talk) 21:20, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, What's the copyright status of this film? Thanks, Yann (talk) 11:41, 5 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Yann! Nice to see you around Wikipedia parts. We've interacted before, my username used to be MonkeyBBGB.
The copyright status is a little tough to properly determine. It seems that the work was not given a formal release in the United States despite being a United States production that was released around 1932-1933, likely 1933. When I check the renewal logs for the film from 1959-1962 I find no renewals. And there seems to be no original notice 1932-1934.
Some consider it a co-production with Canada, but that isn't certain. We do know that a Canadian film producer financed it, but I'm not sure if that qualifies for status as a Canadian work. But using their rules of life+70 then we would have to determine authorship. In that instance it might be Ted Eshbaugh who died in 1969. And 70 years after his death would be 2040, in the purposes of copyright.
I only started to do some digging on it last week, so I'm not certain as to whether or not it was properly published in the United States. I know the article claims that, but it doesn't cite anything. So I might be able to pull up some more information by going through the papers on Newspaper.com like I was doing, but I will need some more time. SDudley (talk) 04:10, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Additionally, it seems that there were reports in August 1933 that it was not yet released. CartoonResearch seems to indicate that it was likely never released widely, but it might have had a smaller showing in New York. So while we know it was created in 1932 and finished by 1933, we aren't certain if it actually saw a release. This could make it tricky since we might consider it an unpublished work as well. All that said, it obviously doesn't seem to be invoking any copyright issues since Thunderbean and the Library of Congress worked together on it and it is widely available in high quality online. Of course that doesn't mean that it lacks copyright, but that does support probable public domain status. SDudley (talk) 04:30, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
And one final note. Once again CartoonResearch seems to claim that it was released in 1933 as a black and white cartoon. This is coming from the person at Thunderbean Animation who worked on the restoration. SDudley (talk) 04:33, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
