• Cropped section of a publicity photograph for the 1940 film The Philadalphia Story, featuring its stars Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart.
• Such images were taken on set during filming, or as part of an organized photo-shoot, by a studio photographer. They were then disseminated to the public and the media for widespread promotion (see Film still).

Public domain explanation

• The full photograph does not clearly contain the copyright symbol ©, the word "Copyright", or the abbreviation "Copr.", as then required for copyright.
• If one looks at other film stills from The Philadelphia Story where a stock code can be seen, none of these include a copyright notice: [1] [2] [3] This suggests that none of the production stills for the film were published with a copyright notice.
• By publishing a photograph without such a notice, under the terms of the 1909 Copyright Act (which was law until 1978) the image went into the public domain.
• If there is any chance that the photograph was copyrighted, under the terms of the 1909 Copyright Act it would have had to be renewed 28 years after publication. A search for copyright renewal records of 1968 ([4], [5]) reveal no trace that this occurred.

Film industry author Gerald Mast has written:

"According to the old copyright act, such production stills were not automatically copyrighted as part of the film and required separate copyrights as photographic stills ... Most studios have never bothered to copyright these stills because they were happy to see them pass into the public domain, to be used by as many people in as many publications as possible." (Film Study and the Copyright Law (1989) p. 87.)