Public Domain
Judith of Bethulia
1914 · Biograph Company · Dir. D.W. Griffith
Griffith adapts the story of the Apocryphal Book of Judith to the screen. During the siege of the Jewish city of Bethulia by the Assyrian tyrant Holofernes, a widow named Judith forms a plan to stop the war as her people suffer in starvation, nearly ready to surrender.
Confidence
100
— Legal Reasoning —
Why this status applies
Judith of Bethulia is a four-reel feature film directed by D. W. Griffith and released by the Biograph Company in March 1914. Because the film was first published prior to January 1, 1928, it is definitively in the public domain in the United States. Under the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, all works published before 1928 have exhausted their maximum possible copyright duration (95 years) and entered the public domain regardless of registration or renewal status.
Even if the film had been published later, it was a major production of the silent era that appears in numerous public domain catalogs and is freely available on the Internet Archive and via various PD distributors. As a pre-1928 US production, it has no remaining copyright protection under current 17 USC statutes.
— Cited Sources —
Supporting facts
- https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/descriptions-and-essays/judith-of-bethulia/
- https://archive.org/details/JudithOfBethulia1914
- AFI Catalog of Feature Films (1911-1920)
- Hurst, Film Superlist: Motion Pictures in the U.S. Public Domain (1894-1939)
Research summary based on cited sources, not legal advice. Always consult a qualified copyright attorney before commercial use.