In the past few days, I’ve been working on accompaniment for the 1928 public domain silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. I uploaded it to YouTube, but you won’t be able to see it. When the upload finished, YouTube informed me:

Copyrighted content has been detected in your video “The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) with new accompaniment”. As a result, your video can no longer be monetized and has been blocked in 243 territories. The copyright owner may be either monetizing it, or receiving analytics about it in other territories. This is not a copyright strike and does not affect your channel.

As with The Lost World, what I have used is a restored version of a public domain film, which is not an original work and therefore shouldn’t be subject to copyright as I understand the Supreme Court’s ruling. The scrolling text at the start of the film says “the Cinémathèque Française has been able to reconstitute this French version, probably very close to the original.”

This is odd, as there are several other instances of this movie on YouTube, most including a copyrighted soundtrack. In fact, I can’t find any version of it on YouTube that doesn’t derive from this restoration. It’s unfortunate, since I think I did an especially good job with the accompaniment. I’d started working on my own translation of the French intertitles, as the English ones I’ve found on YouTube have numerous typographical errors. The movie deals with issues that are still important, such as torture, abusive plea bargaining, “good cop” games, and entrapment.

Technically, I can leave the video up and make it public for whatever places don’t block it. It’s currently private, since I didn’t want to make it public before adding the captions. It isn’t worth bothering for the limited audience that would be able to see it. The copyright claimant could take further action, resulting in another copyright strike.

I’m waiting to find out whether Flicker Alley will respond to my counter-claim on The Lost World, and I don’t want to open up another front in a battle I can’t fight. Maybe I’ll talk with the Plaistow Library about doing it as a live show.