I. Rights in Nosferatu
Abraham "Bram" Stoker died on April 20, 1912. When he died, his estate consisted mainly of his literary work. To support his wife Florence Stoker, the only work with any continuing market value was his most famous novel, Dracula. Unfortunately, that revenue was not particularly impressive at the time.
In 1921, Albin Grau had co-founded a studio called Prana Films and decided to make a loose adaptation of Dracula. This film was finished in late 1921 and released in 1922 and called Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens. It has become a classic film of the German Silent Expressionist movement. It has widely been considered to be in the public domain, but as I will show here, that may not necessarily be the case.
