Charade

Charade is a textbook case of a major studio film entering the public domain due to a defective copyright notice. Under the 1909 Copyright Act, which governed US works published before 1978, a work required a valid copyright notice (the symbol or word 'Copyright', the year, and the name of the claimant) to be displayed on the print upon publication. While the film was meant to be protected, the notice on the release prints was displayed as 'MCMLXIII BY UNIVERSAL PICTURES COMPANY, INC. and STANLEY DONEN FILMS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.' Crucially, it omitted the word 'Copyright' or the symbol '©', which were the only two legally recognized methods for establishing protection at the time. Because the film was published without the legally required notice, it immediately entered the public domain in the United States upon its release in 1963. This error was famously acknowledged by Universal and has led to the film being widely distributed by hundreds of different home video labels and appearing on public domain archives like the Internet Archive for decades. While the musical score by Henry Mancini and the screenplay were registered and/or renewed separately as derivative or underlying works (and thus remain protected), the visual motion picture itself has no US copyright protection.