Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes

Under the 1909 Copyright Act, works published between 1964 and 1977 were granted automatic renewal, but they still required a valid copyright notice on the release prints at the time of publication to secure federal protection. 'Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes' (also known by its 1974 title 'Jive Turkey') was released without a valid copyright notice, a common occurrence for independent blaxploitation and 'grindhouse' films of the era distributed by smaller entities like Trident. A search of the US Copyright Office online records (covering 1978–present) and various registries for 1974 shows no original registration or supplementary registration filed. While automatic renewal would typically protect a 1974 film, the lack of notice upon publication injected the work into the public domain under the 'notice or perish' rules of the time. The film is widely distributed by various public domain labels such as Alpha Video, Mill Creek, and Retro Media, and it resides on the Internet Archive without copyright challenges from a successor in interest, providing strong secondary evidence of its public domain status.