Film Scholar Identifies First Copyrighted Movie

Film Scholar Identifies First Copyrighted Movie

Journal article

1 article.

The perfectly folded letter opened, and pictures dropped out — 18 small images imprinted in two strips on a single sheet. Three men stand around an anvil, enacting a scene from a blacksmith’s shop. “I froze,” says Claudy Op den Kamp, the film scholar who extracted the letter from a Library of Congress archival box in Culpeper, Virginia, USA, in the summer of 2022. “I couldn’t grasp what I was holding.” She certainly hadn’t expected the pictures. Dated Nov. 14, 1893, the letter was signed “W.K.L. Dickson.” She knew him as the head photographer at Thomas Edison’s New Jersey laboratory at a time when Edison was racing against competitors to establish himself as the father of motion pictures — as if, she says, having invented the light bulb and the phonograph wasn’t enough.

Geneva, Switzerland : World Intellectual Property Organization, 2023.

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