Public Reel

Water Rustlers · Beat 162 · permalink

Courtroom

31:52–32:01 Released 1938; registered 1939

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed (partial). 1 quote checked against the transcript; 1 name checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 0 of 1 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 31:5631:56

Play from 31:52 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 98 · shots 289–289. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
courtroom (courtroom, interior) evidence: t:31:59
People
  • Ezra Gregory (named at t:31:59): older man, white hair, wearing dark suit and tie visible
Seen happening
  • A man writes at a desk with a pen. [frame:1]
Seen
pen, desk, paper
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: serious; themes: legal proceeding, authority; style notes: medium close-up, high-contrast black and white, static framing

A man in a dark suit and tie sits at a desk writing with a pen. The transcript indicates Ezra Gregory is being called to take the stand, suggesting a courtroom setting.

“Ezra Gregory take the stand.” 31:59 automatic transcript, may be wrong

The record

No renewal found An automated finding, not a verdict. A renewal would have appeared in the Copyright Office's renewal registrations 27 to 29 years after the term began. Those volumes are loaded and our parse of them found no matching renewal. If that is right, a work published 1931–1963 that was not renewed entered the public domain at the end of its 28th year; the volumes are OCR of old print, and the method page reports how often the parse has been found to miss one. Evidence dossier. The finding concerns the US copyright record for the film; it is not clearance for any use, and this page's annotation is machine output.

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Frame from Water Rustlers (1938) at 31:56 (passage 31:52–32:01); US record: No renewal found

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