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Posted by: Mike Mashon
The Library’s moving image collections began with a bureaucratic decision. In August 1893, an unnamed employee (but most likely W.K.L. Dickson) of the Thomas Edison Laboratories in West Orange, NJ, where work had been going on for several years to develop motion picture photography, sent sequential frames from various camera tests to the Copyright Office. …
Posted in: Copyright, Motion Pictures, Paper Prints
Posted by: Mike Mashon
While it’s very easy to identify the oldest surviving motion picture registered for copyright—Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, which I talked about in this post—it’s much trickier pinpointing the oldest copyrighted television program. [I’ll wait here while you do an internet search on “first copyrighted film” and then “first copyrighted tv show.” See what …
Posted in: Copyright, Television
Posted by: Mike Mashon
Although the collections of the NAVCC are rightfully associated with audiovisual content (after all, it’s in our name), we have a tremendous amount of paper records—well in excess of two million items. And for moving images, this documentation really runs the gamut: posters, lobby cards, photographs, festival catalogs, scripts, trade periodicals, press kits, and on …
Posted in: Copyright, Motion Pictures