There has been exactly one lawsuit in which a court examined the copyright in the Zapruder film, and it was decided in 1968. In Time Inc. v. Bernard Geis Associates, Time — which had bought the film from Abraham Zapruder days after the assassination — sued a publisher for reproducing frames in a book without permission. The court ruled for the publisher on the ground of fair use, finding a public interest in “the fullest information available” about the President’s death.
After losing the 1968 case, Time and its successors never brought another copyright suit. Despite this, the copyright continued to be asserted, and possession of the physical film was used thereafter to restrict access and collect licensing fees. The result is that a copyright over the single most important piece of visual evidence of a President’s assassination — a copyright used to charge licensing fees and to refuse requests to copy the frames — has gone essentially untested for two generations. A federal case now pending in Dallas brings it back before a court.
The mirror image of 1968
The new case is not a repeat of Geis. It is close to its opposite.
In 1968, the owner of the copyright went to court to enforce it: reproducing frames in a single book was enough to draw a federal infringement suit. In the case now pending, the roles are reversed. The plaintiff is not the owner but a user — the Forum on Open Access to Government Records, a nonprofit that publishes primary records of the assassination from the National Archives here on ZapruderFilm.com and reproduced frames of the film in a book of its own. It is asking a court to declare that the copyright, claimed today by the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, cannot be enforced against it at all.
Where Geis was an owner suing a user to stop copying, this is a user suing the owner to establish the copyright’s limits. The thing Geis assumed — that the copyright was valid — is among the things this case puts in question.
There is a reason the case had to take that inverted form. The Museum charges for licenses, declines to grant them, and — the court observed — will neither withdraw the copyright objection that leads the National Archives to refuse copies of the film nor say it intends to sue anyone. The court described this as a “closed loop.” When a copyright is used to keep the public from a historical record but never tested in a suit, the only way the question reaches a court is for the person kept out to bring it.
What the court decided
On August 5, 2026, the court ruled on the defendants’ motions to dismiss and allowed the heart of the case to go forward.
Among the questions the case will now reach:
Abandonment. The Forum argues that the copyright was abandoned — that its owners gave it up, and that the record shows it. The argument rests on a contrast between how the film’s first owner treated the copyright when it was worth money and what happened to it afterward.
When the film was valuable, the owner guarded it closely. In the days after the assassination, Time sold world rights to four foreign magazines within a week, naming a separate price to each; refused the frames to The New York Times; and, when it released six photographs to the wire services, dictated the territory, the embargo hour, the permitted media, and the exact wording of the copyright notice, down to the instruction that the pictures not be “retouched or altered in any way.” In 1968 it sued a book publisher for reproducing frames. This was a copyright its owner policed to the letter.
Then the owner walked away from it. Time lost the 1968 case and did not appeal. In 1974 it tried to give the film to the National Archives — while its own lawyers, according to a National Archives memorandum, were “questioning whether the film has any monetary value.” When that transfer stalled, Time disposed of the film and every claim to it, in 1975, for one dollar. In the fifty years since, through the ownership of the Zapruder family’s company and then the Sixth Floor Museum, the record reflects no copyright suit brought to stop anyone — even as the film was shown on campuses, sold to the public, broadcast on television, and, in time, posted freely online, all without permission from the purported copyright owner.
After that, the family made money from the Zapruder Film, but not through its copyright. What the owners did instead, the Forum contends, was control the film through possession. The highest quality copies came from the owner: the original sat in the National Archives under a private arrangement that let no one copy it without the family’s written permission, so a researcher who wanted the film had to go to the family (and now the Museum), pay a fee, and accept its conditions. Money changed hands — but, the Forum argues, those were the receipts of exclusive possession of an artifact, not the enforcement of a copyright against infringement. When the United States took the physical film in 1998, the family sought a single price for the film and the copyright together and was paid for the film alone. The copyright, the Forum contends, had by then been treated as valueless apart from possession of the object by everyone who had ever held it.
Fair use, and more. The court also allowed the Forum to argue that reproducing the frames is fair use — the same ground that decided Geis — and that the copyright was waived as to certain frames.
The court also denied a motion by the second defendant, the National Archives, which holds early copies of the film as federal records and had declined to provide requested frames because of the Museum’s claimed copyright. On that claim, too, the case proceeds.
Why it matters
For fifty-eight years, a private copyright over the frames that recorded a President’s assassination has functioned as a settled fact — unexamined because it was never seriously contested in court. A federal court has now held that it can be contested: that whether the copyright is valid, whether it was abandoned, whether it expired, and whether reproducing the frames is fair use are all proper questions for a court to decide. If Geis showed the copyright at the height of its power, this case asks what is left of it.
One of several questions
Abandonment is only one of the grounds this case raises, and each has a history worth telling on its own — the renewal that may have come too late, the gap between a registration describing a work of a few seconds and a film that runs far longer, the frames registered as published in 1963 and the film registered as unpublished in 1967, and the reach of fair use since Geis. Future articles will take them up one at a time.
This article describes a pending case and is not a prediction of its outcome. The pleadings and a large collection of primary documents concerning the Zapruder film are available to the public.