There is an excellent report available on the Web on the use and reproduction of film stills and of frame enlargements. I refer our members interested in this question to read the Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Society For Cinema Studies, "Fair Usage Publication of Film Stills" by Kristin Thompson.
This report can be found at http://www.cinemastudies.org/CJdocs/Thompson2.htm
Following is a brief excerpt from the report which I think addresses your specific concerns:
Publicity Photographs. Indeed, the fair-use arguments applying to scholarly and educational uses of publicity photos from films are less clear. Reproducing such a photo involves showing the whole work, or at least a substantial portion of it. The photograph is not a derivative work based on a film, but a separately copyrightable work.
Many such photos, however, were never copyrighted and hence can be reproduced at will. As Gerald Mast points out, "According to the old copyright act, such production stills were not automatically copyrighted as part of the film and required separate copyrights as photographic stills. The new copyright act similarly excludes the production still from automatic copyright but gives the film's copyright owner a five-year period in which to copyright the stills. Most studios have never bothered to copyright these stills because they were happy to see them pass into the public domain, to be used by as many people in as many publications as possible." Mast believes that there is thus no reason for scholars to pay permission fees to publish such photographs: "There is no question that publishers have paid thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of dollars to film companies for precisely this purpose on public domain material."
The report is quite long and informative.
Raymond Smith / R.W. Smith Bookseller (New Haven, Ct.)
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