copyright
Is it legal to distribute any version of a public domain film?
<p>There's an extensive selection of <a href="https://archive.org/details/feature_films" rel="noreferrer">public domain feature films</a> available, but video quality is universally extremely poor as users generally prefer low filesize over high bitrate. Some of the films ("Night of the Living Dead", Charlie Chaplin catalogue and Christopher Lee's "Horror Express" as notable examples) have been released on Blu-ray. Is it allowed to create a lossless copy of a Blu-ray disc and spread the film all over the Internet as a video file? I won't share "extras" (commentary tracks, making of documentaries) which may have been created and owned by the publisher, subtitles, menus and foreign or alternative audio tracks to avoid legal issues.</p>

<p>I don't know if all Blu-ray discs and DVDs have DRM (circumventing may be allowed under some jurisdictions) — DRM is out of the scope of the question as it is uncertain if restricting material free of intellectual property rights is in turn legal.</p>

<p>In the US (<a href="/questions/tagged/united-states" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;united-states&#39;" rel="tag">united-states</a>) copyright protection is only afforded to work with at least a minimal degree of originality, as was held in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co." rel="nofollow noreferrer"><em>Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co.</em>, 499 U.S. 340 (1991)</a>, (see also the <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/499/340/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">actual text of the decision</a>) The Court's decision  included the statement that &quot;The <em>sine qua non</em> of copyright is originality.&quot;</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp." rel="nofollow noreferrer"><em>Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.</em>, 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999)</a> established that &quot;slavish copying&quot; does not produce an original work, and the results are not protected by copyright in the US. (A number of other countries have since followed the same logic.) &quot;Slavish copying&quot; is any process, however technically complex or laborious, that produces or attempts to produce an exact reproduction of the original, or as near to an exact reproduction as the medium and technology allows. Such copies are often in a different medium than the original source.</p>
<p>Therefore, an exact or designedly exact conversion of a work to another medium does not produce an original work, and no separate copyright attaches. If the original work is not under copyright, neither is the converted copy.</p>
<p>Additions to the copy, such a a menu, or added captions, may be protected by copyright. But a  further copy taken from the enhanced copy but not including any of the enhancements or additions will not infringe such a copyright, and will not be an infringement of any copyright if the original source was out of copyright.</p>
<p>Reconstruction of a damaged work that attempts to restore it as exactly as possible similarly does not create a new copyright, because this is not considered an original work either.</p>
<p>In short, if a film is out of copyright (aka &quot;in the public domain&quot;) a Blu-Ray version has no new copyright on the images or sound track. Additions may be protected, but a copy of the disk that omits all such additions will not infringe.</p>
