Intolerance

The film 'Intolerance', directed by D.W. Griffith, was released in the United States in 1916. Under current US copyright law, all works published before January 1, 1928, have entered the public domain due to expiration of the maximum possible copyright term (95 years from publication). As a 1916 production, the film's copyright term would have expired at the end of 1991 (1916 + 75 years under the 1976 Act) or 2011 (under the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act), regardless of whether it was renewed. However, because it was published prior to 1928, it is now definitively in the public domain in the United States. This status is widely documented in film archives, the Library of Congress, and legal scholarship regarding silent-era cinema.