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Murnau's unauthorised Dracula. A court ordered every print destroyed after Florence Stoker sued, and it survived anyway.

Published in 1922, so any US term has expired. No US registration under this title appears in the catalog; the status is a calculation from the date, not a finding about a record.

Watch on the Internet Archive · 1265 shots

Keaton's Civil War chase, now usually ranked among the best American films ever made.

Registered 1926; every term that began before 1931 ended before 2026.

Dossier · Watch on the Internet Archive · 532 shots

The first synchronised-sound Mickey Mouse cartoon. Its 2024 entry into the public domain was the most-watched copyright expiry in decades.

Registered 1928; term expired 1 January 2024. Only this film is free: later versions of the character, and the Mickey Mouse trademark, are not.

Dossier · Watch on the Internet Archive · 3 shots

Hawks, Grant and Russell, the fastest dialogue of studio-era Hollywood.

Registered 1939, released 1940. No renewal appears in the 1966–1968 volumes. The underlying play, The Front Page, had its own copyright history.

Dossier · Watch on the Internet Archive · 360 shots, 140 beats

Republic let the renewal lapse in 1974, television took it up, and that saturation is what made it a classic.

The film's registration was not renewed. The story it is based on (The Greatest Gift) and the score were renewed, and in 1993 Republic used those rights to pull the film back from broadcasters. The frames are one question; the whole is another. No Archive copy is linked: the Archive holds trailers and excerpts, not the film, because the rights in the story and score are asserted against full copies. That absence is the caveat made visible.

Dossier

The distributor changed the title card and left the copyright notice off, which under the 1909 Act put the film in the public domain on release. It founded the modern zombie film.

Public domain through a missing notice, a rule this registry does not yet apply; the finding here is the film's own well-documented history, not a catalog check. Registrations after 1963 are not loaded.

Watch on the Internet Archive · 957 shots

Lang's city of the future. The film every public-domain list includes, correctly only since 2023.

A German work. Its US copyright, lost to formalities, was restored on 1 January 1996 under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act for the term it would have had: 95 years from 1927, which ended on 1 January 2023. Lists that call it public domain were wrong for 27 years and are right now. The registry does not yet model restoration; see the method note. No Archive copy is linked: the copies there are mostly rips of the 2010 restoration, whose newly found footage and new score carry their own rights.

Dossier

Eisenstein's Odessa steps.

A Soviet work restored in the US in 1996 under the same statute as Metropolis, for a term that ran to 1 January 2021. Public domain now; it was not between 1996 and 2020.

Watch on the Internet Archive · 1025 shots