The poster for the iconic 1975 American thriller film, Jaws, it turns out, was never copyrighted.
David Friedman on Ironic Sans:
As we’re all celebrating the 50th anniversary of the movie Jaws, here’s something I bet you didn’t know: Due to a fluke of publishing and copyright law, the Jaws shark is public domain.
It’s not the character of the shark that’s public domain — or someone would surely be making a low-budget horror prequel about how he became the Amity Island Killer. But I’m talking about the famous shark painting from the movie poster:
Friedman’s story about the poster is funny and worth reading. As for the movie itself, I tried watching Jaws about a year ago but I found the pacing just too slow and decided it wasn’t worth it so I turned it off. I’ve seen many parts of it before, just never in one sitting, but I still remember seeing the titular “Jaws”1 as a kid on the Universal Studio tour when I was about one or two years old.
Here are a couple of photos from that trip:
- The shark was nicknamed “Bruce” on set, after Stephen Spielberg’s divorce lawyer.[↩]