On October 1, 2026, the Archivist of the United States quietly signed an agreement with a private Dallas Museum that keeps the clearest, highest-resolution versions of the Zapruder film locked away from the American people.
The Zapruder film is the single most important piece of photographic evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The taxpayers bought it. The government made high-quality copies of it specifically so the public could study it. And the government is still keeping those copies out of reach.
The timing of this agreement is no accident.
Just eight weeks earlier, on August 5, 2026, a federal judge in Dallas handed attorney Mark Javitch a major victory, ruling that a court can order the National Archives to put the Zapruder film online for the public and that the copyright itself was subject to challenge and a determination of fair use.
The government lost in court. So it went around the court.
Mark Javitch: The Lawyer Who Took On the Archives and the Museum
Mark L. Javitch is a federal litigator based in San Mateo, California. He represents the Forum on Open Access to Government Records, a publisher fighting to pry the Zapruder film loose from government and private control.
Javitch has spent years battling the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas and the National Archives in Freedom of Information Act and JFK Records Act cases, including an appeal now pending before the Ninth Circuit. He is the author of SCAM: The Zapruder Copyright — How the Sixth Floor Museum Continues the Coverup (2025). The Forum maintains ZapruderFilm.com, the largest free public collection of National Archives documents on the history of the Zapruder film.
“The one attempt to enforce the Zapruder copyright lost in court in 1967. Inexplicably, 60 years later, the government lets the Museum decide who gets access based on the copyright that could never be enforced.” Javitch said. Javitch suspects the Zapruder film held by the Archives may have been altered — a theory his book lays out in detail, and one the Museum denies. Javitch believes that the Museum rejected the Forum’s request for permission to use the copyright because the Forum’s publications raise the question whether the film was altered, a theory the Museum considers off limits.
Javitch hopes that full public access to the best copies will shed light on the question once and for all. If the film is authentic, the highest-resolution versions will show it. If it is not, the American people deserve to know. Either way, the answer lies in the very versions the government is now locking away. The government promised to make high-quality versions available to the public. It performed the high-resolution scans in 2002, but never made them widely available.
The fight started with a simple request.
