Recreation

Under the current copyright laws of the United States, all works published or registered before January 1, 1928, have entered the public domain. Recreation, a short film starring and directed by Charlie Chaplin, was released by the Keystone Film Company on August 13, 1914. Because the film was published significantly prior to the 1928 cutoff, its copyright protection has expired by operation of law. There is no requirement to search for copyright renewals in the Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) or the Stanford Renewal Database for this work, as even a validly renewed copyright from 1914 would have expired after the maximum 75-year term then-applicable, or effectively reached the end of the 95-year maximum term provided by the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. The film is widely available on public domain archives and is included in numerous Chaplin collections that rely on its expired status.