Question about making a film loosley based on and Edgar Allan Poe Story

Tracey Lee

Tracey Lee

Well-known member
Can anyone tell me what I need to do legally to make a short filmed that is based on one of Edgar Allan Poe's stories?

This will be viewed on the internet as a part of my portfolio, nothing more really, just something i have wanted to do in a while.

Thanks!
 
Sad Max said:
If the source material was published before 1923 - which Poe's work was - you are free to do as you like.

http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm
Click to expand...

I would qualify that by saying find an actual book that was published before 1923. Although if push came to shove, such a book could be produced...

Although probably not an issue with Poe, but in the case of translations from other languages, the 'new' translation is copyrighted by the 'recent' translator...

There could also be a case where a new version of some work which was published in expurgated form at some point in time, and a 'new' version based on 'recently found writings'... may cause problems...
 
There's also date-of-publication versus date-of-copyright, etc; the site gives a much more thorough overview of the rules, which is why I linked to it.
 
Yeah

Yeah

I remember from my readings into copyright law back in the day, and I did a lot of research because I was curious about whether I could safely write non-fiction about the Star Wars saga (which was stupid, you can write non-ficiton based on anything, really), that basically copyright is granted for the life of the author plus 70 years after death, which is pretty reasonable. Of course there are exceptions as noted above, based on unpublished work, translations, etc. And I believe there are further exceptions that can be granted to extend that copyright law even further, but as a general rule it's life of the author plus 70 years. I think that's pretty fair on the part of the copyright office and the law in general, because it allows a fairly long time period for your work to be strictly copyrighted and property of the estate, etc.
 
Any book here that's listed as "Public Domain" (which is almost all) can freely be made into a film.

There's lots of other sites such as this one and this. It just takes a few seconds of googling to find out if something is PD or not.
 
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