Why do studios use Roman numerals in the copyright notice in the end credits? | Hacker News Reader

Why do studios use Roman numerals in the copyright notice in the end credits?

movies.stackexchange.com

113 pointsLammy106 comments

I don't buy the deception theory at all, that it was used to make it hard to determine the year it was made. Everybody has always known which movies are new this year! Or which movie is from 10 years ago. To me, this falls into the common fallacy of "oh people from back then were so dumb/unobservant..." Like the busted myth that Europeans used spices to mask rotten meat.

It seems nobody knows why it started, but it seems pretty intuitive why it's continued -- it looks fancy and formal and important. You went to the Cinema and you had an Experience and at the end it was capped off with a fancy set of Roman Numerals. It's silly like a hundred other aspects of the movies, but it's kind of lovable.

And I can't help but assume that fanciness derives from years being carved in stone as roman numerals for Important Things. On buildings (date of construction), memorials (for wars and important people), and of course gravestones.

I mean, it also wasn't Star Trek 3, it was Star Trek III. Because fancy.

It's more "gravitas" than "fancy."

The GP's turn of phrase read quite convincingly like Iain M Banks, then I see this!

quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur

whatever has been said in Latin seems deep

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_(Q)

Yes, this would be my hypothesis too. I see Hollywood epics all the way from D.W. Griffith (and the studios that made them) wanting to broadcast an aura of gravitas. And nothing does that like using pretentious Roman numerals. Of course it's all convention nowadays.

I would guess it started because you can reuse your work (in an age where you are taking a photo of something physical). It's a lot easier to change V to VI than it is to change 5 to 6.

I can tell you for certain that I use Roman numerals on the copyright dates of the videos I make, because I grew up with Roman numeral copyright dates on the TV programmes I grew up watching - even children's programming had it.

For some reason the one that sticks in my mind is the Blue Peter one with a copyright symbol, the old "three boxes" BBC logo, date in Roman numerals and the little stylised sailing ship logo :-)

Anyway, long story short, I use Roman numerals for copyright dates because fancy like.

Interestingly, that's less of a thing over here. e.g., productions of the public broadcasters in Germany usually end with the date in Arabic numerals. Including Sesame Street.

Yeah, even today the BBC seems to invariably use Roman numerals on their productions. Must be a tradition for them?

They've been around just over C years, or since MCMXXII. Yeah I'd say so.

Little known fact but in the very early years they went by "BB100".

The BBC didn't have copyright statements at the end of the credits until the early 1970s, and initially they used Arabic numerals, but after a couple of years later (the mid/late 70s) switched to Roman numerals, which they've stuck with since. I think the changeover is around the time end credits and channel logos stopped indicating "Colour".

IIRC in 1999 one of the trailers for the BBC's millennium coverage involved years counting up to MM in Roman numerals, which seemed perhaps to be a nod to their use of them in credits.

Historically not really true. Distribution used to be much… weirder.

Gone With the Wind, for instance, toured as a premium roadshow release for almost 2 years before getting a general release.

And I still don't understand how people enjoy it...

No surprise there.

It's a film from 1939. The grammar of filmmaking has changed dramatically since then -- direction, acting styles, lighting, staging, everything. Watching something from even the 1960s is super weird and kind of alienating.

Films from very long ago are best understood as historical documents. They tell us a story, sure, same as John Wick 4, but they also tell us about the time period they're from.

This isn't something that's unique to film. Novels, too, get harder to connect with as you move decades past their release. Storytelling changed, and the shared context with the author becomes harder and harder to share.

I find _modern_ cinema spastic and alienating.

The pacing and cinematography of pre-1990 cinema is what feels correct to me.

I strongly suspect you were born at the 80's or 90's...

Not to say that modern cinema is perfect, but somebody born at the 60' or 70's would think the 80-90's style is shallow too. Cinema has been getting quicker since it was created.

(I do think it has moved so far into quick takes that it can't help but go back a little now, but I was born at the 80's, so I'm not sure how reliable is my opinion.)

Ridley Scott thought Blade Runner 2049 was slow and boring, and it's true that the original (from 1982) is much faster paced and action packed.

The release date is not relevant.

"The grammar of filmmaking has changed dramatically since then"

Yes, it has. But it's questionable if it's been for the better. A bad film from any era is just bad, but I'd contend that a well made one easily crosses the generations. Mention Casablanca for instance, I can honestly say I've never come across anyone who didn't enjoy it or say it's a bad film.

"Watching something from even the 1960s is super weird and kind of alienating."

One has to wonder what you actually like to watch. You likely didn't like Shakespeare at school because it too is dated.

Pity really, you'll have missed a lot.

Edit: I'm curious why you find say '60s films weird and alienating. (There's much to criticize but I've never heard that said before.)

First, don't put words in people's mouths. You'll find that doesn't usually engender reasonable discussion.

Casablanca is a good film, but its pacing, storytelling, acting, and direction are all very dated to a modern viewer.

Acting in good films since the 1970s has tended to be far more naturalistic and less stylized, which makes older work feel fake and cloying. That's not always a dealbreaker, though, as you note. It just puts a gulf between a modern viewer and the work that the work has to do more work (so to speak) to bridge.

GWTW didn't have to do that work in 1939.

What words?

There's no point arguing with you as we're miles apart, except to say I find most modern films—and many, many old ones unwatchable (usually for different reasons). I just turn them off.

The reasons are many including those that you've mentioned and others especially the pace and horribly tight editing of most modern films/videos—boys let loose with video editors/switching toys instead of the patience and pace of a Moviola. (Incidentally, I've used both.)

Give us examples of films you like then people will tell you why—and what generation you're from.

Incidentally, it's been touted on multiple occasions that Gone With The Wind has been shown somewhere in the world every day since 1939—an all time record. It's a remarkable success story that's crossed many generations, and its production for the era a remarkable technical achievement.

I first saw it decades ago and I enjoyed it, but a large part of my interest was technical, it being one of the first spectacular color films (it still stands up very well by today's standards).

> Like the busted myth that Europeans used spices to mask rotten meat.

This is a "busted myth?" I have a friend who was in a Soviet forced labor camp and this is exactly what they did.

The myth is about the reason for the popularity of spices in midieval Europe.

And yes it's busted, because spices were very expensive -- they were luxury. The people who could afford spices were not people who ever found themselves needing to eat rotten meat. And mixing with rotten meat was the last thing you'd do with something as expensive as a spice.

Would it suprise you to learn that people used to gather their own spices? Not everything was imported. Not busted it the slightest.

not disputing, but in ye olde times people had a taste for a lot more rotten things, like garum and various fermented meat and fish products.

Additionally, the spices on fresh meat helped preserve the meat for an additional hour or two.

Films used roman numerals in copyright notices because books used roman numerals in copyright notices.

Books used roman numerals in copyright notices because the copyright notice was on the title page. Title pages used roman numerals because they looked better as title page display text than arabic numerals (so Volume II rather than Volume 2), and mixing numeral types looked ugly.

None of this was a hard and fast rule and house styles varied.

Just remembered that Roman numerals were and still are common in legal documents and I have a vague memory that they were the standard for dates in legal documents at one time in the US and a copyright date is a legal disclaimer. Quick search brings up this

https://www.unrv.com/roman-numerals/use-roman-numerals-legal...

Perhaps we have a lawyer on the site who can offer more, search engines really are nearly useless these days.

I wonder if it made it harder to change dates back when contracts were written by hand. Similar to the now obsolete but preserved practice of writing a number in a contract both in digits and in words.

Nowadays the only contract people write by hand is a check, and it preserves the “write the number twice” practice.

I think it is the reason given by the second response in OP link which I find dubious in the sense of film aging but makes sense for written documents.

Roman numerals are pretty easy to change, even compared to Arabic.

What are some examples?

V -> VI -> VII

I imagine that the ones with preceeding values would be harder though, perhaps XIX -> XX for example

In handwritten Arabic numerals, you could maybe get away with:

3 -> 8

(non-German) 7 -> 9

(German) 1 -> 4

5 -> 6

Presumably changing I to V or removing prefix subtraction characters (e.g., XIX becomes XX).

If something ends with “I“ you can add two more I’s and have it go from 1 to 3.

And so on.

Using that appending technique works to sneak the year forward in most cases - perhaps that was the intended benefit? We can update the copyright from (say) 1950 to 1951 without any obvious tampering.

This is why you draw a line before, and after amounts on cheques.

There's a German idiom "turning an X into a U" (U being a V) with the origin about changing the number on a chalkboard recording your purchases in a pub. In a hand-written contract you can do the opposite, adding two lines to turn a V into an X.

More generally, a fun fact many miss about Roman numerals is that you can do this with all digits (except I because that would require fractions):

X (10) -> V (5)

C (100) -> L (50)

M (1000) -> D (500)

It's less obvious in prose like this but it helps if you consider that these numbers would normally be drawn with straight lines (e.g. M would often end up looking more like |X| instead of |V|, which explains why cutting it in half would result in |> or D). This is also a handy way of remembering the less frequently used digits like L or D which are harder to remember because they don't really stand for anything (unlike C = centum and M = mille).

Like many security policies, it merely has to be harder, not impossible.

There is an interesting decoding aspect where a "M" can never follow a "V" in a roman numeral representation. So its technically very easy to turn a written capital V into a written capital M but its not actually useful in practice.

Also there are word/letter spacing issues where technically one could remove "III" from the end of a numeral but it would probably result in typographically or graphic arts weird looking spacing.

It’s interesting that Japan and China have separate more complex sets of numbers specifically to prevent this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals#Formal_numbe...

TIL! Thanks. Fun fact, I just looked at my Aikido 2nd Dan certificate, and it uses a mix of formal and in-formal numerals. Informal for the certificate number and the date, and the formal character for '2' for my rank number.

> Similar to the now obsolete but preserved practice of writing a number in a contract both in digits and in words.

I have always seen that as some check sum? I.e. both need to be wrong and the same wrong to mess things up.

Yes, it's mostly to prevent someone from doodling and changing a 3 to an 8 somewhere in the amount.

I suspect it's a little of column A and a little of column B. I asked my pop this question in the early 1970s and his answer was the first part of the SO answer--so that it wasn't dated as old. This predated the internet, predated video and cable TV, and seemed conventional wisdom at the time. I'm inclined to believe that the reason it was used after all those other technical advancements was simply tradition.

See also car model years beginning in September as another shelf-life improvement technique.

If you couch it as "preserving timelessness" or "suspension of disbelief" it fits what an artistic group of people might have had in mind better than "deception".

I think you're providing ways to describe deception that are themselves deceptive.

Not deception. Suspension of disbelief ;)

to "make it difficult for viewers to determine exactly how old the show is", the reason being the older the date the "staler" the material may seem to the audience.

That might be the most inane take I've heard all week. What's his idea, that movie theaters predating the concept of home video were showing old movies and trying to pass them off as new like nobody would notice if they couldn't read the copyright date? Specifically movies the audience hasn't seen or heard of, yet movies new enough their "staleness" wouldn't be given away by the camera technology and dialogue choices? There's like a hundred different reasons this "deception" explanation is nonsense.

Even as a kid, I was able to read Roman numeral representation of the year. Warner Bros Looney Tunes cartoons would include the copyright year in their title credits and I was able to determine which year it was even though they were displayed very briefly. For example MCMXXXVIII -> 1938.

Lots of dated things, for the sake of formality, used Roman numerals, e.g. gravestones, books, etc.

http://www.web40571.clarahost.co.uk/roman/use.htm

Not just past tense. Here in Canada at least, many recent date/marker stones are still carved with Roman numerals. Bridges, in particular. The preservation in that specific context seems to hint at something. It's the same reason why we carve stone in upper case. Because the Romans did it that way.

For gravestone and other stone carvings, i feel it's not purely for the sake of formality, by design roman numerals are easy to carve in stone with a chisel and a hammer... At least before reaching the number 90, which is when the C letter appears.

On old buildings the letter U was probably carved as a V for that same reason.

The letter U was carved as V because the original Latin alphabet did not have U. V could be a consonant or a vowel, and later on U came about to denote the latter. Wikipedia says the first use of U was in 1386.

The same thing is true of I and J. J is the consonant version, and iirc came about around the fourth century AD.

Much of the world still uses Roman numerals by convention in some date-related contexts. Most commonly to refer to centuries (as in XIX century), but also sometimes for months in dates: "24.IV.2023" etc. This scheme be handy in that it allows for very terse ways to write incomplete dates, too - e.g. "24 IV" for "April, 24".

They are also used in many languages to represent centuries, as can be seen in the titles of the 20th century Wikipedia article in different languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century

The better question is why Super Bowl, of all things is using Roman numerals...

They could have stopped this insanity at 50, but decided to carry on.

They did stop using Roman numerals for Super Bowl 50 but only for that game and then reverted back to to Roman numberals for LI 51 and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_50

> The better question is why Super Bowl, of all things is using Roman numerals...

Football players are armored and helmeted physical combatants that entertain audiences in arenas. Remind you of anything?

My guess would be that using Roman numerals was an attempt to "elevate" the product beyond its working class entertainment origins. Talkies were shown in venues where less sophisticated people frequented and the industry needed to escape those connotations of un-sophistication and even perhaps immorality. In the same way baseball was considered entertainment for the rougher lower class crowd. Roman numerals added a pretentious sophistication.

The two proposed theories are “deception” (hiding the age of the movie) and “convention” (it’s how everyone else does it, so we keep doing it that way). General consensus seems to be the deception theory is nonsense and the convention theory is pretty obviously correct (and I agree).

The next interesting question is why the convention persists. One theory that works for things like monuments might be “gravitas”: it’s harder to decipher the date, but monuments are important and sacred, and we signal our respect for that sacredness by accepting the extra decoding cost. That theory does not work for copyright dates on movies, there is nothing sacred there. However, there is also no pressure on the copyright date to be readable and informative. Approximately nobody needs to be able to tell the copyright date of a movie from a glance during their credits roll. So there is no cost to imitating gravitas and no reason to stop; in such a frictionless environment, the inertia of the convention is, by itself, enough to keep the practice going indefinitely.

I was always told it was done because it was historically done that way.

It looked classy in the 1920s.

Since the MCMXX's

I find it humorous that people think this is some sort of deception when it is probably simple tradition. Roman numerals used to be common and are still used in many places like for preface/introduction in many books, is that also some sort of deception? they could certainly used 0-<page number> for that or even a different font if they needed to separate it from the pagination of the text but they use these confusing Roman numerals instead.

I think maybe by the time the end credits roll around it might be too late to be like "ah shit this movie wasn't brand new!" anyway, heh.

I would have agreed with you if your post was not 20 minutes old, get with the times.

Credits used to be at the start of the movie. George Lucas got into hot water for refusing to include any at the beginning of “Star Wars”.

Including a copyright notice? I'm most familiar with post-1960s films which had both, but left "small print" things like that to the very end.

Wikipedia suggests opening credits were always incomplete credit-wise - "Films generally had opening credits only, which consisted of just major cast and crew, although sometimes the names of the cast and the characters they played would be shown at the end. " - but doesn't talk about copyright there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closing_credits

He is referring to the restrictions of a union / syndicate: Directors Guild of America.

It's a group of people that you pay as a Director and that sets the guidelines how work should be done.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/George_Lucas#:~:text=The%20....

I'm aware that there used to be more credits - especially the "giving credit to the people involved" sort - up front.

I don't have a specific recollection of if they included all the "legalese" sort of non-credits like these copyright notices.

Afaik old films had everything at the beginning then trailers at the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9Xt1T_LfdY

Older films tended to show the copyright date during the opening credits, on the title card.

Pretty much any book pre 1950ish used Roman numerals lol

In what sense? For the preface/intro yes, and that is still common. Before the 1950s hyphenated page numbering was very common especially in technical/educational books and the preface/intro would be 0-1 to 0-n, chapter one being 1-1 to 1-n etc, appendix was often in Roman numerals in these books and done in a variety of ways. When you get back to the ~1900s or so you also saw hyphenated Roman Numeral page numbering but from what I can tell that was never a standard outside of a few niche fields.

Edit: There was also a phase of hybrid Roman/Arabic hyphenated page numbering in there somewhere, if memory serves most of the books I have seen with that were from the interwar period, chapter/section would be Roman and page in Arabic.

Chapters.

It probably used to be just this simple indication that this section was something different (frontmatter) by using a less common but still generally understood number format.

It did used to be more common, especially for things like monuments. But it's become less common over time. I was traveling with a friend of mine who went to good suburban public schools outside of a major city and then an elite technical school. I was somewhat shocked to learn she had never been taught (or bothered to learn) Roman numerals. Even if it's sort of a trivia thing at this point, I just assumed it was something that a reasonably well-educated person would just know.

Yes, it clearly started out at least partly as a prestige thing. Books (and even periodicals) indeed used to often have the publication date in Roman numerals, and the older and more self-consciously presteegious a book is the more likely it is to have them in that format. Clearly the inter-war studios were trying to claim some of that prestige for themselves, just as they added other neo-Classical elements to their branding for similar reasons: think of the Columbia logo and so on.

(BBC TV credits use Roman numerals as well. Apparently they switched from Arabic to Roman as late as 1976: https://www.tvforum.co.uk/tvhome/bbc-colour-end-credits-chan... )

This. You get to see old cities with a lot of commemorative monuments, and they are all with years in Roman numerals (and many of them, with the whole inscription in Latin).

Academic books were written in Latin and were dated with Roman numerals because, well, they were written in Latin.

For example here's a cover of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4th Latin edition, printed in 1562, with the year of edition in Roman numerals:

https://archive.org/details/institutiochrist1592calv/page/n3... (see page 4 of the book browser)

Films, as creative work, simply followed this tradition. That's it.

> they could certainly used 0-<page number> for that

Hello, fellow programmer. A fine day for zero-based indexing, isn't it?

Recall that Roman numerals are also used for movie sequels. This clearly isn't about concealing the age.

Well, that feels like a different circumstance to me. II, III, IV and so on are significantly more understandable and readable compared to... MMXXIII or what have you.

Before long, Hollywood is going to have to decide whether to continue using Roman numerals for sequels, or switch to Arabic numerals. Roman numerals are fine and well when it's for "Star Trek III" or even as much as "Star Trek VI" (somehow they skipped V...), but when in the modern age when your new movie is "Ant-Man and The Avengers CCXCIV" it gets a little ridiculous.

Star Wars movies use Roman numerals. I don't see them changing that. There will be episodes X, XI, XII...

Only the Skywalker Saga films use Roman Numerals, the other Star Wars films do not.

(Whether there will be more Skywalker Saga films is not something I’d like to speculate on.)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098382/

Star Trek V is the one with "Shakespeare is better in the original Klingon".

No, that's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

The movie you pointed to doesn't exist; it's a conspiracy by IMDB and other parties to make you think there really was a Star Trek V, when in fact there was never any such movie. If you believe there was, then you're a crazy person who probably also thinks there were sequels to The Matrix.

Star Trek V absolutely exists, if it didn’t, I wouldn’t have anything to point to to explain why I ignore Shatner when he tries to say how Gene Roddenberry would disapprove of things in modern Trek.

> Before long, Hollywood is going to have to decide whether to continue using Roman numerals for sequels, or switch to Arabic numerals.

They’ve already decided: “whatever we feel like for the film in question"

> but when in the modern age when your new movie is “Ant-Man and The Avengers CCXCIV” it gets a little ridiculous.

None of the Marvel films have used roman numerals, and, IIRC, in the MCU only the Iron Man films and the Guardians of the Galaxy films have used numbers (and Deadpool, which wasn’t really MCU until the next one, also uses numbers) outside of early working titles. Most of the other “series” within the MCU (Thor, Avengers, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Black Panther) have used subtitles after the first (or in the case of Ant-Man, used a longer main title for the second, and a subtitle to that for the third).

Roman numerals for years are not so much harder to read than those for single digit numbers because they don't change very often. MMXXIII and MMXXIV are about as easy to understand as III and IV - you've already had three years to learn that we're doing MMXX prefixes now.

Anecdotally, this is much less common now days. You see it all the time in films and TV shows made before 2000 or so.

However, the BBC is an exception: all their productions seem to use Roman numerals.

We Brits are funny. Obsessed about our independence and not being controlled by Europe, but still paying deference to things such as Roman numerals. Ironically the alternative Arabic numerals are even more “foreign”.

One problem with Roman numerals is they are harder to proofread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Time_I_Saw_Paris#Copy...

> The film was released in 1954; however, there was an error with the Roman numerals in the copyright notice showing "MCMXLIV" (1944), meaning the term of copyright started 10 years before the film was released.[8] Thus, the normal 28-year copyright term ended just 18 years after the film was released, and MGM neglected to renew it presumably because they believed there was still 10 years left in the term.[8] The film entered the public domain in the United States in 1972.

In 1910 there was a court case on the legality of using Roman numerals in a copyright assignment. Stern et al. v. Jerome H. Remick & Co. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/stern-v-jerome-h-894639394

> The defendant attacks the plaintiff's case on three grounds: ... second, because the notice of copyright stated the year in Roman numerals, not Arabic ...

> Nor do I find any difficulty in deciding that Roman numerals conform to the notice prescribed by the statute. Roman numerals are a part of the language of this country. They are constantly in use upon monumental architecture of all sorts and for serial purposes upon books, and they are a part of the language as taught in the public schools, and understood by all but the most illiterate. Nor can one seriously contend that the notice required by the statute could be fulfilled only by Arabic numerals. If the letters were written out in words, it would certainly be a compliance. I regard the writing of it here in Roman numerals as more nearly a literal compliance with the statute than to write out the year in words.

(The link I gave doesn't give the full quote. See https://archive.org/details/lawofmotionpictu0000froh/page/51... or https://archive.org/details/atreatiseonlawc00halegoog/page/n... for the continuation.)

The algorithm for doing long division in Roman numerals is one of those things that's educational but you're not sure it was actually worth learning, but it probably was.

Well, considering that most of the schools don't teach that algorithm... it almost surely wasn't worth learning it.

There are .ultiple ways in which a thing can be worthwhile. I don't know that algorithm, but generally I take joy from similar things, so maybe I will look it up. It's now on my list.

Of course, but only for nerds like me. Reminds me of the old joke about regular expressions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415441

Roman numerals were easy to chisel into stone. Beyond that, kind of a headache.

Yeah. True regular expressions, which is to say the Kleene kind, are a lovely tool for testing membership in a given regular grammar.

However what we call regexes today are, often, a considerably more theoretically powerful tool that can match some[1] non-regular languages. Programmers are tempted to use them as a general purpose matcher, which they absolutely are not. Thus, the punchline of the joke.

[1] As far as I know the exact computational power of perlre isn't proved, but it can describe some subset of the context-free languages at the very least.

It helps for (sigh) coding tests in interviews. People looove roman numeral based problems for some reason.

"Everything worth learning is taught in most schools" is a remarkably bold claim. Would you be willing to please offer some support for it?

Interesting how it’s framed as two sibling theories, but one is really the likely and obvious one; basically a default and the other is a malicious conspiracy.

Do they? Most movies and TV shows I've watched in the last 10 years or so just use Arabic numerals in their end credit copyright notice.

Depends on where they are made. For TV the US Arabic, for the UK Roman

Imagine if Rome inspired by Hindi-Arabic positional number system. We could have I, V, X, C but positional (or like binary?) as 10s. For example II would be 11 and XII would be 111. Actually I guess that should be 100 100s and one 10 and one 1 so 10,011.

Nobody knows. It's all presumed and post hoc rationalisation.

Justinian

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