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morgandawn"Boldly Going Where No Copyright Claim Has Gone Before
One of the most notorious cases of copyright omission happened in connection with a little show called Star Trek— another NBC series, but this one a production of Desilu Studios. When originally telecast during the 1966-67 TV season, the entire first season’s voyages of the starship Enterprise aired without a single indication of copyright anywhere in the program.
It wasn’t until years later — and after Star Trek had metamorphosed from a short-lived cult TV show into a cultural phenomenon and highly prized commodity — that the copyright lapse even drew any attention. It was at the time of the advent of home video, when a number of small mom-and-pop outfits, believing that first year of Star Trekto be in the public domain, began selling copies of the episodes on videocassette.
Paramount, which had inherited the Star Trek franchise and produced the remaining two years of the series and all of its spin-offs after parent company Gulf + Western purchased Desilu in 1967, sought to regain exclusive rights to the first season by mounting a legal challenge to the little nickel-and-dime distributors that were circulating those first 26 episodes.
The upshot? Based on its existing copyrights on all subsequent Star Trek properties, Paramount won the right to retroactively copyright the entire first season of Star Trek, in the process, successfully suing all of those little companies — the ones that thought they were in the clear selling public domain shows — right out of business."
https://thegolddiggers.wordpress.com/2007/09/21/whose-show-is-it-anyway/