The JAWS shark is public domain | Hacker News Reader

The JAWS shark is public domain

ironicsans.ghost.io

150 pointsMBCook31 comments

There's a reasonable chance someone has the painting on their wall. I know people in Hollywood who have some incredible items on displays they only show to trusted friends.

There was a time when Universal and others would put the primary hero props from their movies straight into their prop warehouses to get rental income from them for other productions. Some clever chap realized there was only a $300 damage/loss fee on each item, and word spread throughout the production personnel in Hollywood. Lots of irreplaceable props were suddenly "stolen" from productions.

I was involved in tracking one down to return to Universal (now in a museum) and the guy who had it made a fatal mistake of boasting about it one time in a forum. He wouldn't give it up, even with a letter from their lawyers, but we realized the writer of the movie lived nearby, so we had him go knock on the guy's door and it was handed over then.

I don't know what the value of the original painting would be. I got to see the BTTF posters before the painter, Drew Struzan, shipped them out to the buyer. I was surprised how cheap they were, I think he sold the three of them for $90K/piece. Mary Steenburgen was glued onto the third poster since they cast her late, after the painting was finished.

Was Mary Steenburgen in Back To The Future? Oh, never mind you mean BTTF3.

“It belongs in a museum!”

> an artist should be able to enjoy the fruits of his work in his lifetime if he wants to

Not if you're an illustrator doing work for hire. It's not unreasonable or unusual for the company who commissioned the art to own the copyright. It doesn't always work that way, but there's no reason to think Kastel was robbed without us knowing the actual terms of his contract with Universal. I assume he sold the copyright to Universal, and Universal fumbled the copyright after that, but that doesn't mean it reverts back to Kastel.

As I understand it, problem wasn't Universal. It was that the publisher didn't put his name on the copyright page, so the art became public domain under the laws at the time.

That law has been replaced and you now get copyright automatically.

That was my takeaway as well. The weird thing is: since it's someone else doing the initial publication, their omission of copyright credits is costing the artist their copyright. That's... unexpected. I don't know how things worked back then in book art, but if the artist wasn't contracted as work-for-hire, protecting their copyright ought to become the burden of those who actually made the art public. I don't know if this argument was put forth in appeals, but ruling+motivation on this point from the appeals committees are absent from the story.

Sounds like you could accidentally make someone else's art public domain by forgetting to include them on the copyright page...

edit well, perhaps that's part of the reason the copyright laws were updated.

I assume that's why copyright in so many places outside the US only allow a company to license it from the creator. Copyright cannot always be surrendered.

What a great story. Going from "it's a vagina with teeth, that's bad" to "it's a penis with teeth, that's good" made me chuckle... just sounds so typical of creatives.

Some might point and say sexism, but I think it's consistent with established tropes. There are piles of analogies between sex and aggression (the Latin word for “sheath” is vagina). An image of a penis-like shark attacking a nude woman is another to throw on the pile.

The creatives of that time were so sex-minded. There were countless references to Freud and Kafka, HR Giger designed monsters after anatomy and fertility. Sex in general seemed to be on the tip of the tongue of so many authors, writers, and directors of that pre-internet era.

Accessible internet probably took the wind out of their sails. Media has become less porny over time, and the younger generations have even expressed an aversion to it.

Knowing several creatives, it's definitely not less porny or horny, it's just differently horny and porny.

Fetish content is *RAMPANT* when you know the techniques that are being used, for example. Edging is *very*, *very* popular in clickbait content, for example.

This is just how the horror genre works. Big fantastical monster or supernatural horrors but meant to be connected to real life fears.

The classic haunted house trope where the family sinks all their money into a house and father gets slowly possessed by a demon is meant to evoke the fear of financial troubles causing your partner to become abusive.

The Xenomorphs in Alien are meant to evoke the fear of rape and child birth.

Unsuspecting woman alone in a vulnerable situation attacked by a vicious creature— I can see why they thought the penis angle fit better.

> There are piles of analogies between sex and aggression (the Latin word for “sheath” is vagina).

Well, you're right about the Latin meaning of vagina. How does that illustrate the existence of analogies between sex and aggression?

Sheaths also sheath swords.

Relatedly, the slang (or 'real') word for penis is/was weapon in old English.

> Sheaths also sheath swords.

So? Sharing an extremely general trait with many things including swords isn't an analogy to swords. Is wine analogized to aggression because guns have barrels?

Besides scabbards, the other prominent use of vagina in Latin was to refer to the husk of grain. Do you conclude that an analogy is being drawn between sex and nourishment? Sex and worthlessness?

Wouldn't that conflict with the idea that the use of the word vagina is an analogy to aggression? How can the same fact be evidence both for and against that idea?

> Relatedly, the slang (or 'real') word for penis is/was weapon in old English.

Why do you think this is related?

Interactive Jaws poster from Back to the Future is here, just click on it -> https://floor796.com/#b3l3,84,583

> He went to the Museum of Natural History to study sharks, and he had a model pose across a couple of stools for reference of what someone looks like swimming.

That explains why the swimmer, at least, looks a bit fake.

> He went to the Museum of Natural History to study sharks...

At last, one person who did his homework!

That's what I thought after seeing the first image, the "vagina with teeth" which in my eyes just look like a weird woman's mouth with just some teeth added around... what a terrible work, probably the authour hadn't seen a shark in his life? nor he researched then even a bit, to get some references.

Final Jeopardy June 16, 2025...

>In 1974 Allison Maher Stern posed horizontally on stools & pretended to swim for a cover of this book

It feels to me that even ignoring copyright law, Kastel has a limited claim to the credit here.

Art director Alex Gotfryd came up with the concept of the Shark and the Swimmer, while Paul Bacon did the original drawing.

At this point what’s to distinguish Kastel’s painting of a shark and a swimmer from anyone else making a painting of a shark and a swimmer?

> At this point what’s to distinguish Kastel’s painting of a shark and a swimmer from anyone else making a painting of a shark and a swimmer?

Sure, someone else could make a similar painting, but mostly people didn't; they just copied his painting (or copied a photo of his painting, whatevs)

> ”… Kastel realized that there was something fishy about the painting’s copyright situation.”

I see what you did there.

My first draft had a lot more fish puns. I decided they were a distraction so I cut most of them. A few still slipped through the net.

I see what you did there :)

Wow! Thats quite a catch!

You're going to need a bigger boat.

Not to worry, I was still hooked.

God, I love pre-1976 copyright. So many formalities and intricacies. I’m kind of amazed that there’s so much from that era that remains in copyright.

tldr; the famous art from the Jaws movie poster was originally a book cover. When first published it lacked the required attribution of the time to get enforceable copyright.

IIRC, there are some films in public domain for having "failed" to do this as well.

The biggest is probably "Charade" with Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn and Walter Matthau.

Funny - the first one that comes to mind for me is "Night of the Living Dead" (1968).

This is the one I was thinking of.

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