100 years old, yet its copyright only expired five years ago—in the United States. In Europe and other life+70 regions, the film will remain copyrighted past 2050, even though Lotte Reiniger died nearly half a century ago!
Part of the problem is that it wasn't possible to upload it to YouTube until recently (and someone from Germany could still demand for it to be taken down or made unavailable in Germany), while also, being almost 100 years old, it was not released commercially - which both conspired to condemn it to obscurity.
The problem is that copyright is supposed to secure for the authors the benefits of a creative work for a limited time. If it's decades longer than the longest human lifespan, that's not "a limited time" in any sense that is meaningful to humans.
Copyright is now a global thing harmonized by treaties, and the view you describe is the one from the American Constitution, but other countries (even if they compromised on a certain length in treaties) aren't necessarily coming out of the same legal tradition.
Yes, but I'm not aware of any jurisdiction with an appetite for perpetual copyright in general. At least, not in the Western sense of copyright being a nearly unlimited, and property-like (transferable, subdividable, and assignable) legal right to refuse access to a work for any reason.
The actual divide between American and European legal traditions has to do with moral rights and copyright formalities. In Europe, you could very easily take a work from one country, translate it, and not only publish it in another, but get copyright title to it in that country as well. And publishers did this heaps. Europe's solution was to get rid of copyright formalities - works are just born copyrighted. America hated this and spent about a hundred years digging their heels in about it until they begrudgingly signed onto the Berne Convention without really agreeing to it.
While a primary goal of Berne was to make copyright work for artists again[4], a secondary goal was to protect the publishing empires that had been built up in each country. Both sides of this tradition wanted copyright terms that were long enough to protect their publishing empires but not so long as to require them to pay royalties to the folklore and song those empires plundered on the way up. You can see this in how easily America was willing to go along with life+70 when the EU offered it to them, while they still drag their feet on automatic registration and moral rights.
There are a handful of countries that have a "paying public domain" - as in, anything in the public domain must still be paid for, but the legal "owners"[0] of the work do not have the right to refuse that payment. That sort of arrangement is perpetual, but because it lacks the right to refuse access, it's not copyright in any way Hollywood would recognize it. It's more helpful to think of these in the same way one thinks of Canadian Content (CanCon) laws: a way for countries that are not net cultural exporters[3] to siphon off the top of the creative industries of countries that are.
I can also think of a few cases in which specific works were locked behind very narrow sui generis IP[2] rights. Like, only one particular children's hospital in the UK is allowed to perform Peter Pan on stage. Or, you're not allowed to sell merchandise with the Mona Lisa on it in Italy[1]. These are copyright-adjacent, in that they're government-granted monopolies over creative works. And they're perpetual. But they don't transfer like copyright and they don't cover all the same acts that copyright does.
So, yes, the "limited Times" framing is very American, but no other jurisdiction has meaningfully objected to it, either. We joke about digging up the grave of Shakespeare every time talk of copyright extensions happens, but if you do extend out copyright forever, then every person in the world has fractional blood inheritance to a very large amount of human culture. Going back to that "paying public domain" thing, some people have even floated the idea of collective ownership over indigenous cultural works. Like, imagine if when Disney made the movie Moana, they had to pay literally every Polynesian person a royalty check. Nobody in power wants something like that to happen, because that's not building up an empire. That's tearing it down, brick by brick, royalty check by royalty check.
[0] The notion of who gets the money from a paying public domain varies; but is usually some government collection agency.
[1] Italy actually used to have a paying public domain, but replaced it with this law.
[2] In the Doctorowian sense of "intellectual property is the right to dictate the conduct of your competitors".
[3] To be clear, creative industry is so broadly globalized that it renders this concept outdated. e.g. Canada has shittons of cultural exports, they're just all on YouTube.
