Charlie Chaplin Festival

The 'Charlie Chaplin Festival' is a compilation film released by United Artists in 1938, consisting of four of Chaplin's Mutual Film Corporation shorts from 1916–1917 ('The Adventurer', 'The Cure', 'The Floorwalker', and 'The Immigrant'). Under the Copyright Act of 1909, works required a renewal in their 28th year to maintain protection. While the individual shorts were original productions from the 1910s, this specific 1938 compilation was a new derivative work. Searches of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database and the Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) show no renewal record for a film compilation under this title. Furthermore, the underlying films ('The Adventurer', 'The Cure', etc.) are famously in the public domain because their original copyrights (registered between 1916 and 1917) were not renewed by the respective owners upon expiration of the first term. Because both the underlying shorts and the compilation itself lack valid copyright renewals, the film is in the public domain in the United States.