Is Atom Age Vampire (1960) public domain?

It is on every public domain list on the internet. The copyright record says otherwise, and here is the number.

Not public domain in the United States

What is usually said

Public domain — never registered or renewed in the United States, and every public domain list carries it.

The finding, and the working behind it

In copyright: an Italian film with no US registration and no renewal, restored by the URAA on 1 January 1996 and running to the end of 2055.

The renewal test is the wrong question here, and asking it first is what puts this film on every public domain list. It is an Italian film, so the question to ask before any other is the URAA one.

The single US filing is a 1987 registration of a released film as UNPUBLISHED, twenty-seven years after it played theaters in Italy. That does not create a term. It is the same move as the 1987 Carnival of Souls filing, and it means the same thing, which is nothing.

Under the old rules the film genuinely was public domain in the United States. The URAA restored it on 1 January 1996. The test is whether the work was still under copyright in its source country on that date. Italy runs 70 years from the death of the last surviving of the director, the screenwriters and the composer. Anton Giulio Majano died in 1994 and Armando Trovajoli in 2013, so the film was plainly still protected in Italy in 1996 and qualified.

The US release came nearly three years after the Italian one, so the thirty-day simultaneous publication exception does not apply and the source country is Italy, not the United States.

Restoration was automatic and required no filing, so the absence of a Notice of Intent to Enforce in the Copyright Office records proves nothing. An NIE was only ever needed to proceed against somebody who had already relied on the work being free.

The register, as it stands

Italian release: 16 August 1960, as Seddok, l’erede di Satana
US release: 29 May 1963, by Manson Distributing
Only US registration: PAU001073690, filed 25 November 1987 by UPA Productions of America, as an UNPUBLISHED work
Renewal: none, and none was possible
Restored: 1 January 1996, by the URAA
US copyright runs to: the end of 2055, 95 years from 1960
Searched: 2026-09-01

How to check this yourself

Everything above is drawn from public records. None of it requires our word:

The Catalog of Copyright Entries, the Copyright Office’s printed registration and renewal volumes, scanned and searchable at the Internet Archive and at the Online Books Page. Registration numbers beginning LP or MP are film entries.
The Copyright Office online records at copyright.gov, which are complete from 1978 and therefore decisive for any renewal that fell due from then on.
The NFPF Field Guide to Sponsored Films, for the industrial and educational titles, which records copyright status entry by entry.

Where these numbers came from

Copyright Office public catalog, registration PAU001073690.
The URAA, 17 U.S.C. §104A, on restoration of copyright in foreign works.

What this does and does not mean

This is a finding about United States copyright, made in good faith from the public record. Copyright terms differ by country, and a film in the public domain here may still be protected elsewhere.

A renewal registration on the public record is evidence that a copyright was claimed, not a judgment that the claim is good. Who holds it, and whether the chain of title behind it stands up, are separate questions we are not in a position to answer. What we can say is that the record is not empty, and every list describing this film as free is asserting that it is.

This is a record of research and not legal advice. If you hold a right in this film, or you think we have read the record wrong, write to mike@tapeterritory.com with what we missed and we will correct it here.

What we do about it

We do not publish this film and we do not link to a copy of it. It is on our blocked list by name rather than by upload, because the same title reappears under a dozen identifiers and blocking identifiers would be an endless game.

Writing this down costs us a film people search for, which is rather the point. Everything else in this section is a film we did clear, researched the same way by the same person, and a record that only ever says yes would not be worth reading.

Why we did this research

Establishing what may be published is the first step before restoring a film and writing an audio description for it. That is what this site is for, and we do the same work on commission — audio description and captioning, with published rates.