Ariel Zilber, New York Post; Amazon Prime slammed for streaming ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ with key scene cut out: ‘Sacrilege’
"The existence of the abridged version is rooted not in a creative choice by Amazon, but in the film’s famously tangled copyright history, according to the University of Connecticut.
In 1974, the distributor failed to renew the movie’s copyright, sending “It’s a Wonderful Life” into the public domain.
For nearly two decades, television stations freely aired the film — especially during the holidays — without paying royalties.
But the legal landscape shifted in the 1990s.
While the film itself had fallen into the public domain, the rights to two underlying elements had been properly maintained: the original short story “The Greatest Gift,” by Philip Van Doren Stern, and the musical score by Dimitri Timokin, a UConn legal blog noted.
Republic Pictures, later acquired by Paramount, used those copyrights to effectively reclaim control over the movie’s distribution, arguing that any exhibition of the film required licensing the copyrighted story and music.
The “Pottersville” sequence is the portion most directly adapted from Stern’s story.
Legal experts say the abridged version appears to be a workaround — by removing that specific sequence, distributors may have believed they could avoid infringing on the short story’s copyright while still offering a version of the film."
