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Originally Posted by Danny Burk
The 1927 version of CAT AND THE CANARY has been out on DVD for a long time (in several versions, in fact). The film itself is PD; does the Abend decision only affect films back to a particular date?
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That's a tricky question. Maybe there's nothing the heirs of the playwright can do if a derivative work becomes PD, but perhaps they can still have a stake in a work that's not PD, like the 1939 film version. I assume the original Cat and the Canary play itself is PD, as it's now 85 years old.
It does seem odd that a Bob Hope film, from a period in which virtually all of his feature-length films have hit VHS and/or DVD, is still unavailable legally in R1.