After an examination of the record, it appears that the earliest motion picture copyrighted was _Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, January 7, 1894_. The claimant was William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, West Orange, New Jersey. This film, popularly known in film circles as “Fred Ott’s Sneeze,” and famous as one of the films which launched the modern motion picture industry, now has added fame as the first to be registered for copyright. There were only three other entries to the end of 1894. For some inexplicable reason, there is a total gap from the end of 1894 to October 23, 1896, at which date the registrations substantially began and continued. One highly important irregularity in this connection must be pointed out; there is evidence that the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, in its 1902 and 1903 registrations, submitted, along with current material, a considerable backlog of pictures produced from late 1895 to 1902. An appreciable amount of research would have to be done to clarify the wide discrepancies between the production and copyright dates of this company. There is no evidence that other claimants followed this practice. Not all motion pictures produced from 1894 to 1912 appear in the copyright record. However, the overwhelming majority do—representing nearly every important advance made in the first 18 years of the medium. The record pertaining to the newsreel type of film affords some surprise. The entries for these are rather profuse and important from 1896 to 1907, after which there are practically no entries during the period under consideration. It is clear that by 1908 fictional entertainment had become an almost exclusive business with the industry. Although the entries in the record books of the Copyright Office do not indicate the exact physical nature of items submitted by claimants as copyright deposits, an investigation of the Library of Congress holdings of this material revealed a heterogeneous collection. Claimants submitted deposits indiscriminately and variously in the following forms: Mutoscope reels; sample 35mm frames from every scene in a motion picture, in the form of positive photographic paper prints or on celluloid; photographic stills or enlargements—one each of representative, but not all, scenes from a motion picture; photographs of the sets used in a motion picture; Kineographs (popularly known as thumb books or flip books); and, most important of all, complete motion pictures printed on 35mm positive photographic paper rolls. About half of the films listed in this catalog are represented in the Library’s collection of paper prints. Other films are available in other collections or are likely to be located in the future in forgotten storage places. An ingenious way has been found to rephotograph the paper prints on celluloid by the optical printing process in order that they may be put to current use.