The Gay Shoe Clerk

The Gay Shoe Clerk is a short silent film directed by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Manufacturing Company. This film is definitively in the public domain in the United States because it was published and registered for copyright prior to January 1, 1928. Under current US copyright law (the 1976 Act and the Copyright Term Extension Act), all works published before 1928 have seen their copyright terms expire. Specifically, for films of this vintage, the Edison Company typically registered these works as 'paper prints' with the Library of Congress to ensure protection before motion pictures were explicitly named in the copyright act in 1912. Regardless of the registration method, the maximum possible term of 95 years from publication has long since lapsed, placing the work in the public domain as of 1999 at the latest.