8 ms·
Why do studios use Roman numerals in the copyright notice in the end credits?
- mattl 4y agoI was always told it was done because it was historically done that way. It looked classy in the 1920s.
- vidanay 4y agoSince the MCMXX's
- ofalkaed 4y agoI find it humorous that people think this is some sort of deception when it is probably simple tradition. Roman numerals used to be common and are still used in many places like for preface/introduction in many books, is that also some sort of deception? they could certainly used 0-<page number> for that or even a different font if they needed to separate it from the pagination of the text but they use these confusing Roman numerals instead.
- sufficer 4y agoPretty much any book pre 1950ish used Roman numerals lol
- ofalkaed 4y agoIn what sense? For the preface/intro yes, and that is still common. Before the 1950s hyphenated page numbering was very common especially in technical/educational books and the preface/intro would be 0-1 to 0-n, chapter one being 1-1 to 1-n etc, appendix was often in Roman numerals in these books and done in a variety of ways. When you get back to the ~1900s or so you also saw hyphenated Roman Numeral page numbering but from what I can tell that was never a standard outside of a few niche fields. Edit: There was also a phase of hybrid Roman/Arabic hyphenated page numbering in there somewhere, if memory serves most of the books I have seen with that were from the interwar period, chapter/section would be Roman and page in Arabic.
- hydrok9 4y agoChapters.
- majormajor 4y agoI think maybe by the time the end credits roll around it might be too late to be like "ah shit this movie wasn't brand new!" anyway, heh.
- ofalkaed 4y agoI would have agreed with you if your post was not 20 minutes old, get with the times.
- skhr0680 4y agoCredits used to be at the start of the movie. George Lucas got into hot water for refusing to include any at the beginning of “Star Wars”.
- majormajor 4y agoIncluding a copyright notice? I'm most familiar with post-1960s films which had both, but left "small print" things like that to the very end. Wikipedia suggests opening credits were always incomplete credit-wise - "Films generally had opening credits only, which consisted of just major cast and crew, although sometimes the names of the cast and the characters they played would be shown at the end. " - but doesn't talk about copyright there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closing_credits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closing_credits
- rvnx 4y agoHe is referring to the restrictions of a union / syndicate: Directors Guild of America. It's a group of people that you pay as a Director and that sets the guidelines how work should be done. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/George_Lucas#:~:text=The%20Directors%20Guild%20of%20America,fine%2C%20he%20quit%20the%20guild https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/George_Lucas#:~:text=The%20....
- majormajor 4y agoI'm aware that there used to be more credits - especially the "giving credit to the people involved" sort - up front. I don't have a specific recollection of if they included all the "legalese" sort of non-credits like these copyright notices.
- ghaff 4y agoIt probably used to be just this simple indication that this section was something different (frontmatter) by using a less common but still generally understood number format. It did used to be more common, especially for things like monuments. But it's become less common over time. I was traveling with a friend of mine who went to good suburban public schools outside of a major city and then an elite technical school. I was somewhat shocked to learn she had never been taught (or bothered to learn) Roman numerals. Even if it's sort of a trivia thing at this point, I just assumed it was something that a reasonably well-educated person would just know.
- leoc 4y agoYes, it clearly started out at least partly as a prestige thing. Books (and even periodicals) indeed used to often have the publication date in Roman numerals, and the older and more self-consciously presteegious a book is the more likely it is to have them in that format. Clearly the inter-war studios were trying to claim some of that prestige for themselves, just as they added other neo-Classical elements to their branding for similar reasons: think of the Columbia logo and so on. (BBC TV credits use Roman numerals as well. Apparently they switched from Arabic to Roman as late as 1976: https://www.tvforum.co.uk/tvhome/bbc-colour-end-credits-change-31508 https://www.tvforum.co.uk/tvhome/bbc-colour-end-credits-chan... )
- sombragris 4y agoThis. You get to see old cities with a lot of commemorative monuments, and they are all with years in Roman numerals (and many of them, with the whole inscription in Latin). Academic books were written in Latin and were dated with Roman numerals because, well, they were written in Latin. For example here's a cover of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4th Latin edition, printed in 1562, with the year of edition in Roman numerals: https://archive.org/details/institutiochrist1592calv/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/institutiochrist1592calv/page/n3... (see page 4 of the book browser) Films, as creative work, simply followed this tradition. That's it.
- Zecc 4y ago> they could certainly used 0-<page number> for that Hello, fellow programmer. A fine day for zero-based indexing, isn't it?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- causality0 4y agoto "make it difficult for viewers to determine exactly how old the show is", the reason being the older the date the "staler" the material may seem to the audience. That might be the most inane take I've heard all week. What's his idea, that movie theaters predating the concept of home video were showing old movies and trying to pass them off as new like nobody would notice if they couldn't read the copyright date? Specifically movies the audience hasn't seen or heard of, yet movies new enough their "staleness" wouldn't be given away by the camera technology and dialogue choices? There's like a hundred different reasons this "deception" explanation is nonsense.
- u801e 4y agoEven as a kid, I was able to read Roman numeral representation of the year. Warner Bros Looney Tunes cartoons would include the copyright year in their title credits and I was able to determine which year it was even though they were displayed very briefly. For example MCMXXXVIII -> 1938.
- User23 4y agoThe algorithm for doing long division in Roman numerals is one of those things that's educational but you're not sure it was actually worth learning, but it probably was.
- Joker_vD 4y agoWell, considering that most of the schools don't teach that algorithm... it almost surely wasn't worth learning it.
- johannes1234321 4y agoThere are .ultiple ways in which a thing can be worthwhile. I don't know that algorithm, but generally I take joy from similar things, so maybe I will look it up. It's now on my list.
- mfragin 4y agoOf course, but only for nerds like me. Reminds me of the old joke about regular expressions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415441 Roman numerals were easy to chisel into stone. Beyond that, kind of a headache.
- User23 4y agoYeah. True regular expressions, which is to say the Kleene kind, are a lovely tool for testing membership in a given regular grammar. However what we call regexes today are, often, a considerably more theoretically powerful tool that can match some[1] non-regular languages. Programmers are tempted to use them as a general purpose matcher, which they absolutely are not. Thus, the punchline of the joke. [1] As far as I know the exact computational power of perlre isn't proved, but it can describe some subset of the context-free languages at the very least.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoIt helps for (sigh) coding tests in interviews. People looove roman numeral based problems for some reason.
- spicyramen_ 4y ago[dead]
- ofalkaed 4y agoJust remembered that Roman numerals were and still are common in legal documents and I have a vague memory that they were the standard for dates in legal documents at one time in the US and a copyright date is a legal disclaimer. Quick search brings up this https://www.unrv.com/roman-numerals/use-roman-numerals-legal-documents.php https://www.unrv.com/roman-numerals/use-roman-numerals-legal... Perhaps we have a lawyer on the site who can offer more, search engines really are nearly useless these days.
- gumby 4y agoI wonder if it made it harder to change dates back when contracts were written by hand. Similar to the now obsolete but preserved practice of writing a number in a contract both in digits and in words. Nowadays the only contract people write by hand is a check, and it preserves the “write the number twice” practice.
- ofalkaed 4y agoI think it is the reason given by the second response in OP link which I find dubious in the sense of film aging but makes sense for written documents.
- naniwaduni 4y agoRoman numerals are pretty easy to change, even compared to Arabic.
- jschveibinz 4y agoLots of dated things, for the sake of formality, used Roman numerals, e.g. gravestones, books, etc. http://www.web40571.clarahost.co.uk/roman/use.htm http://www.web40571.clarahost.co.uk/roman/use.htm
- retrac 4y agoNot just past tense. Here in Canada at least, many recent date/marker stones are still carved with Roman numerals. Bridges, in particular. The preservation in that specific context seems to hint at something. It's the same reason why we carve stone in upper case. Because the Romans did it that way.
- kpw94 4y agoFor gravestone and other stone carvings, i feel it's not purely for the sake of formality, by design roman numerals are easy to carve in stone with a chisel and a hammer... At least before reaching the number 90, which is when the C letter appears. On old buildings the letter U was probably carved as a V for that same reason.
- asveikau 4y agoThe letter U was carved as V because the original Latin alphabet did not have U. V could be a consonant or a vowel, and later on U came about to denote the latter. Wikipedia says the first use of U was in 1386. The same thing is true of I and J. J is the consonant version, and iirc came about around the fourth century AD.
- int_19h 4y agoMuch of the world still uses Roman numerals by convention in some date-related contexts. Most commonly to refer to centuries (as in XIX century), but also sometimes for months in dates: "24.IV.2023" etc. This scheme be handy in that it allows for very terse ways to write incomplete dates, too - e.g. "24 IV" for "April, 24".
- Mordisquitos 4y agoThey are also used in many languages to represent centuries, as can be seen in the titles of the 20th century Wikipedia article in different languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century
- firebones 4y agoI suspect it's a little of column A and a little of column B. I asked my pop this question in the early 1970s and his answer was the first part of the SO answer--so that it wasn't dated as old. This predated the internet, predated video and cable TV, and seemed conventional wisdom at the time. I'm inclined to believe that the reason it was used after all those other technical advancements was simply tradition. See also car model years beginning in September as another shelf-life improvement technique.
- tyingq 4y agoIf you couch it as "preserving timelessness" or "suspension of disbelief" it fits what an artistic group of people might have had in mind better than "deception".
- ggm 4y agoNobody knows. It's all presumed and post hoc rationalisation.
- lanza 4y agoJustinian
- u801e 4y agoDo they? Most movies and TV shows I've watched in the last 10 years or so just use Arabic numerals in their end credit copyright notice.
- pasc1878 4y agoDepends on where they are made. For TV the US Arabic, for the UK Roman
- _tom_ 4y agoRecall that Roman numerals are also used for movie sequels. This clearly isn't about concealing the age.
- perryprog 4y agoWell, that feels like a different circumstance to me. II, III, IV and so on are significantly more understandable and readable compared to... MMXXIII or what have you.
- midoridensha 4y agoBefore long, Hollywood is going to have to decide whether to continue using Roman numerals for sequels, or switch to Arabic numerals. Roman numerals are fine and well when it's for "Star Trek III" or even as much as "Star Trek VI" (somehow they skipped V...), but when in the modern age when your new movie is "Ant-Man and The Avengers CCXCIV" it gets a little ridiculous.
- GalenErso 4y agoStar Wars movies use Roman numerals. I don't see them changing that. There will be episodes X, XI, XII...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 4y agoOnly the Skywalker Saga films use Roman Numerals, the other Star Wars films do not. (Whether there will be more Skywalker Saga films is not something I’d like to speculate on.)
- thanatropism 4y agohttps://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098382/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098382/ Star Trek V is the one with "Shakespeare is better in the original Klingon".
- crazygringo 4y agoI don't buy the deception theory at all, that it was used to make it hard to determine the year it was made. Everybody has always known which movies are new this year! Or which movie is from 10 years ago. To me, this falls into the common fallacy of "oh people from back then were so dumb/unobservant..." Like the busted myth that Europeans used spices to mask rotten meat. It seems nobody knows why it started, but it seems pretty intuitive why it's continued -- it looks fancy and formal and important. You went to the Cinema and you had an Experience and at the end it was capped off with a fancy set of Roman Numerals. It's silly like a hundred other aspects of the movies, but it's kind of lovable. And I can't help but assume that fanciness derives from years being carved in stone as roman numerals for Important Things. On buildings (date of construction), memorials (for wars and important people), and of course gravestones. I mean, it also wasn't Star Trek 3, it was Star Trek III. Because fancy.
- hydrok9 4y agoIt's more "gravitas" than "fancy."
- sjsanc 4y agoThe GP's turn of phrase read quite convincingly like Iain M Banks, then I see this!
- pif 4y agoquidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur whatever has been said in Latin seems deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_(Q) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_(Q)
- rintakumpu 4y agoYes, this would be my hypothesis too. I see Hollywood epics all the way from D.W. Griffith (and the studios that made them) wanting to broadcast an aura of gravitas. And nothing does that like using pretentious Roman numerals. Of course it's all convention nowadays.
- maxerickson 4y ago
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- cheese_van 4y agoMy guess would be that using Roman numerals was an attempt to "elevate" the product beyond its working class entertainment origins. Talkies were shown in venues where less sophisticated people frequented and the industry needed to escape those connotations of un-sophistication and even perhaps immorality. In the same way baseball was considered entertainment for the rougher lower class crowd. Roman numerals added a pretentious sophistication.
- eesmith 4y agoOne problem with Roman numerals is they are harder to proofread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Time_I_Saw_Paris#Copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Time_I_Saw_Paris#Copy... > The film was released in 1954; however, there was an error with the Roman numerals in the copyright notice showing "MCMXLIV" (1944), meaning the term of copyright started 10 years before the film was released.[8] Thus, the normal 28-year copyright term ended just 18 years after the film was released, and MGM neglected to renew it presumably because they believed there was still 10 years left in the term.[8] The film entered the public domain in the United States in 1972. In 1910 there was a court case on the legality of using Roman numerals in a copyright assignment. Stern et al. v. Jerome H. Remick & Co. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/stern-v-jerome-h-894639394 https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/stern-v-jerome-h-894639394 > The defendant attacks the plaintiff's case on three grounds: ... second, because the notice of copyright stated the year in Roman numerals, not Arabic ... > Nor do I find any difficulty in deciding that Roman numerals conform to the notice prescribed by the statute. Roman numerals are a part of the language of this country. They are constantly in use upon monumental architecture of all sorts and for serial purposes upon books, and they are a part of the language as taught in the public schools, and understood by all but the most illiterate. Nor can one seriously contend that the notice required by the statute could be fulfilled only by Arabic numerals. If the letters were written out in words, it would certainly be a compliance. I regard the writing of it here in Roman numerals as more nearly a literal compliance with the statute than to write out the year in words. (The link I gave doesn't give the full quote. See https://archive.org/details/lawofmotionpictu0000froh/page/516/mode/2up?q=%22Roman+numerals+are+a+part+of+the+language+of+this+country.%22 https://archive.org/details/lawofmotionpictu0000froh/page/51... or https://archive.org/details/atreatiseonlawc00halegoog/page/n145/mode/2up?q=%22Roman+numerals+are+a+part+of+the+language+of+this+country.%22 https://archive.org/details/atreatiseonlawc00halegoog/page/n... for the continuation.)
- Reason077 4y agoAnecdotally, this is much less common now days. You see it all the time in films and TV shows made before 2000 or so. But modern productions almost always just write out the year in the normal way, eg: “(C) 2018 Lions Gate Films Inc”. However, the BBC is an exception: all their productions seem to use Roman numerals.
- n1b0m 4y agoWe Brits are funny. Obsessed about our independence and not being controlled by Europe, but still paying deference to things such as Roman numerals. Ironically the alternative Arabic numerals are even more “foreign”.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vl 4y agoThe better question is why Super Bowl, of all things is using Roman numerals... They could have stopped this insanity at 50, but decided to carry on.
- lizknope 4y agoThey did stop using Roman numerals for Super Bowl 50 but only for that game and then reverted back to to Roman numberals for LI 51 and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_50 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_50
- Maursault 4y ago> The better question is why Super Bowl, of all things is using Roman numerals... Football players are armored and helmeted physical combatants that entertain audiences in arenas. Remind you of anything?
- Waterluvian 4y agoInteresting how it’s framed as two sibling theories, but one is really the likely and obvious one; basically a default and the other is a malicious conspiracy.
- dghughes 4y agoImagine if Rome inspired by Hindi-Arabic positional number system. We could have I, V, X, C but positional (or like binary?) as 10s. For example II would be 11 and XII would be 111. Actually I guess that should be 100 100s and one 10 and one 1 so 10,011.
- fwlr 4y agoThe two proposed theories are “deception” (hiding the age of the movie) and “convention” (it’s how everyone else does it, so we keep doing it that way). General consensus seems to be the deception theory is nonsense and the convention theory is pretty obviously correct (and I agree). The next interesting question is why the convention persists. One theory that works for things like monuments might be “gravitas”: it’s harder to decipher the date, but monuments are important and sacred, and we signal our respect for that sacredness by accepting the extra decoding cost. That theory does not work for copyright dates on movies, there is nothing sacred there. However, there is also no pressure on the copyright date to be readable and informative. Approximately nobody needs to be able to tell the copyright date of a movie from a glance during their credits roll. So there is no cost to imitating gravitas and no reason to stop; in such a frictionless environment, the inertia of the convention is, by itself, enough to keep the practice going indefinitely.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vk5tu 4y agoFilms used roman numerals in copyright notices because books used roman numerals in copyright notices. Books used roman numerals in copyright notices because the copyright notice was on the title page. Title pages used roman numerals because they looked better as title page display text than arabic numerals (so Volume II rather than Volume 2), and mixing numeral types looked ugly. None of this was a hard and fast rule and house styles varied.