Comment by bentley
5 days ago
100 years old, yet its copyright only expired five years ago—in the United States. In Europe and other life+70 regions, the film will remain copyrighted past 2050, even though Lotte Reiniger died nearly half a century ago!
What's the problem, here?
The problem is that copyright is supposed to secure for the authors the benefits of a creative work for a limited time. If it's decades longer than the longest human lifespan, that's not "a limited time" in any sense that is meaningful to humans.
Copyright is now a global thing harmonized by treaties, and the view you describe is the one from the American Constitution, but other countries (even if they compromised on a certain length in treaties) aren't necessarily coming out of the same legal tradition.
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Part of the problem is that it wasn't possible to upload it to YouTube until recently (and someone from Germany could still demand for it to be taken down or made unavailable in Germany), while also, being almost 100 years old, it was not released commercially - which both conspired to condemn it to obscurity.
Says the guy using a registered trademark as his username.