David and Goliath

The film 'David and Goliath' (Italian title: 'David e Golia') was an Italian production released in Italy in early 1960 and distributed in the US by Allied Artists later that year. Under the law at the time, works from 1960 required a copyright renewal between their 27th and 28th year to remain protected. A search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database and the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) shows that while the motion picture was registered (LP19277; May 19, 1961), no renewal was filed by the claimant (PBC Productions) or the distributor. Furthermore, because the film was published in the United States by Allied Artists with a copyright notice that was subsequently not renewed, it entered the public domain in the US after its initial 28-year term expired in 1988. While the URAA (1996) restores copyright to many foreign films that were in the public domain for failure to comply with US formalities, it specifically excludes works that were first published in the US within 30 days of their foreign publication. Per the AFI Catalog and Film Superlist (Hurst/Baer), this film is widely recognized as having fallen into the public domain due to non-renewal and is currently distributed by dozens of public domain labels including Alpha Video and Sinister Cinema.