More than sixty years after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a US federal court is still dealing with copyright issues related to the most famous “home movie” of the event – the Zapruder film.
The case involves a Texas nonprofit called the Forum on Open Access to Government Records. The Forum alleges that the publicly seen version of the footage is an altered forgery.
The defendants are the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Dallas County Historical Foundation d/b/a The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (the Museum).
As the judge explained,
Perched atop a concrete pedestal in Dealey Plaza, Abraham Zapruder captured, on film, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Although that footage is widely available on the internet, some, including the Forum, believe that today’s “Zapruder film” is not the original. It is instead an altered version meant to conceal the truth of what happened on that fateful day. The Forum contends that the Museum and NARA are complicit in a conspiracy to conceal those alterations. Through this lawsuit, the Forum seeks to invalidate the Museum’s purported copyright interest in the Zapruder film and compel NARA to publish a first-generation copy of the film online.
The judge recently ruled on a dispute involving the 26 seconds of 8mm home-movie footage that captured the assassination.
The Museum, in Dallas, Texas, is a non-profit organization that maintains and operates historical exhibits related to President Kennedy’s assassination. It purports to own the Zapruder film’s copyright.
As the court explained,
Since 1963, Mr. Zapruder’s original ownership interest in the film has changed hands several times. First, only days after the assassination, Mr. Zapruder sold all rights in the film to Time, Inc., in exchange for royalty payments. … Time then registered the film for copyright protection in 1967. …. Faced with rampant, unauthorized public use of the Zapruder film, Time initially protected its copyright interest through litigation. … But after losing an infringement action on fair-use grounds, … Time eventually transferred its copyright interest back to Mr. Zapruder’s heirs for a nominal sum, …. In 1999, Mr. Zapruder’s heirs, operating through a family partnership called LMH Co., then transferred their interest in the copyright to the Museum.
The Forum disputes the validity of several of those transfers.
NARA is a federal agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that is responsible for preserving US government records and other documents in the National Archives. NARA possesses several early copies of the Zapruder film.
The Forum maintains a public website, on which it makes available “the largest-ever collection of historical documents related to the Zapruder film.”
In 2025, the Forum published a book entitled “SCAM: The Zapruder Copyright-How the Sixth Floor Museum Continues the Coverup.” The book includes 73 frames from the Zapruder film.
Several months after publishing the book, the Forum sued both the Museum and NARA. The Forum sought a declaratory judgment that the Zapruder copyright is invalid or unenforceable and also sought a declaratory judgment of non-infringement (by the SCAM book) due to fair use.
The Forum also sought to compel NARA to make certain Zapruder frames publicly available online.
The Museum and NARA both moved to dismiss, in part because the Forum lacked standing.
As Bloomberg Law noted, the judge “trimmed” but refused to dismiss the lawsuit.
The judge found that the Forum had standing to sue over the Museum’s purported copyright interest in the film because the group had unsuccessfully sought a license from the Museum to use the film before publishing the frames in the book without authorization.
As CBS News reported back in 1999, arbitrators ordered the US government to pay the heirs of Abraham Zapruder $16 million for the physical version of the film (the celluloid as distinct from the copyright), which is also owned by the Zapruder family but held in storage by the National Archives.
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