Beyond the Rocks

Under US copyright law, all works published or registered before January 1, 1928, have entered the public domain regardless of whether they were renewed. 'Beyond the Rocks', starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, was released in May 1922. Because this release date precedes the 1928 cutoff, its statutory copyright term has expired. The film was famously considered a lost film for many decades until a nitrate print was discovered in the Netherlands in 2003. While the EYE Film Institute Netherlands restored the film and it was subsequently re-released on DVD by Milestone Films, these modern restoration efforts and distribution deals do not revive the underlying 1922 copyright, which remains in the public domain in the United States.