Movie copyrights - roman numerals

[Marcel Birgelen]

I still remember some copyright banners in the form of © MM <Insert company here>, both on film and on TV, but it looks like it got out of fashion right about that time. Maybe because it didn't look all that fashionable anymore and maybe because it was now too easy to decode:

Film moguls thought Roman numerals looked classier but they also had a business reason. The public liked to think they were watching new material, not some film which had been made years before .In fact they often were seeing just that.Using Roman numerals meant that they'd have to be very good at classics and very quick, to translate the date into a form they'd recognise, all in the brief time it was on the screen.Of course they couldn't, so they didn't know the date.However, the makers' own legal requirements for copyright date etc were duly satisfied by the Roman numbers.

Source

[Bobby Henderson]

The Roman numerals thing is all a style thing. Lots of old statues and buildings had chiseled inscriptions using Roman numerals. Historically, movie studios have tried very hard to elevate the craft via marketing into being just as much an art form as something you would see in a museum. It's evident in a lot of old studio logos and even the designs of studio entrances. The use of Roman numerals is another added visual touch along those lines.

The legal industry is another one that likes those Roman numerals, for obvious pretentious reasons.

Lately the Roman numerals have disappeared out of use because a really short Roman numeral, such as the one for the year 2000, "MM" doesn't look very cool at all and it even looks unintentionally funny. Cue the Crash Test Dummies song. A Roman numeral such as "MCMLXXXIV" looks more cool than "MMXXI." Yeah, our current year looks like the word "maxi" -as in maxi-pad. Bloody awful.

[Harold Hallikainen]

And why did they in the first place?

[Mike Croaro]

Why don't studios use Roman Numerals for movie copyrights anymore?