Disclaimer: I do not plan to trade, market or otherwise illicitly distribute any of the material under discussion. It’s just a curiosity question.
Something that I’ve often noticed while watching 1950s-70s game shows over the years is that they often do not carry a copyright notice at the end of their credits. Most Goodson-Todman network games didn’t start carrying a copyright line until late 1977 or so (although their syndicated shows had copyright notices as early as 1968). When the credits stopped rolling on a 70s daytime episode of “The Price is Right”, the show’s logo just came up and the picture faded out. The same was true of “What’s My Line?” and “I’ve Got a Secret”.
Also, many soap operas didn’t carry copyright notices in those days, although I don’t know as much about this area of programming. The Proctor and Gamble serials didn’t carry copyright notices until about 1979.
Are these programs still protected by copyright? I assume they must be somewhere, based on various laws or court rulings, because otherwise they’d be offered on a lot of cheap DVD labels. As it is, kinescopes of some 50s game shows do appear on a handful of compilations from these smaller companies.
If these episodes are copyright protected, did the producers have to go through the process of registering and renewing every single episode?
Creative work are protected by copyright the moment they are created. Giving notice and registering the work just makes it easier to defend, as well as proving for statutory damages not available to unregistered works.
That’s the guiding thought now, but it wasn’t always the case. At least early on, on printed materials, a copyright notice had to appear as far as I know. There were copyright law changes in the 1970s that changed that. Serialized broadcasts may have had some other way of giving notice, though.
It really could be a matter of producers thinking no one would ever want to or be able to copy or resell some of that stuff. Before home VCRs, how would the average person bootleg a TV broadcast? Point your silent super 8mm movie camera at it and tape record the sound at the same time?
I’m well aware of Kenescope, hence the “average person” in the part of the post you didn’t quote. Kinescope was used by producers to make copies of some of their own LIVE broadcasts so they wouldn’t be lost forever. It’s not like potential bootleggers had those in their living rooms.
“Hey Marge, we’ll make a killing selling copies Arthur Godfrey to, um. . . whoever can replay this thing. . .”
How do you know that the shows when they were originally broadcast didn’t carry copyright notices? Are you just looking at contemporary copies, are you going from memory when you first saw them, or did you read that somewhere?
Now, of course, a copyright notice is not necessary, but back in the days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, you could lose your copyright for failure to include a notice or including an improper notice. Some legal writers have claimed that Disney lost the copyright (but not the trademark) on Mickey Mouse due to improper copyright notices on Steamboat Wilie cartoons, a charge that Disney vigorously denies.
I’ve seen them mostly on Game Show Network, some on Youtube. The GSN copies were derived from the original kinescopes and studio masters. Going to YT and looking at the closing credit sequences of the shows in question will confirm what I wrote in my original post.
For example: several 1972 daytime episodes of “The Price is Right” are posted and they have no copyright notice. The syndicated version, though, says “COPYRIGHT (C) MCMLXXII PRICE PRODUCTIONS, INC.” underneath the logo at the end of the closing credits. Had Messrs. Goodson and Todman wanted a copyright line on the daytime version, they would’ve done it just like the syndicated series, not on a separate slide or whatnot.
Likewise, the closing portion of a 1974 episode of “The Edge of Night” reveals that there was also no copyright notice on that program at the time–the credits end on the logo, then there’s a fade-out and fade-in to a Christmas-themed CBS network ident. That’s it.