Is Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) 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
It is on the free streaming services, it is on every public domain list, and the poster is sold as royalty-free art. The story is that Allied Artists let it lapse and the giant woman belongs to everybody.
The finding, and the working behind it
Not public domain: renewed as RE0000291853 on 17 April 1986, in copyright to the end of 2053.
The renewal is on the public record and it was filed on time. A film published in 1958 fell due for renewal in its 28th year, 1986, and RE0000291853 was entered on 17 April 1986 - inside the window, by a company that had acquired the Allied Artists library.
The reason nobody finds it is the number. The Copyright Office cataloged the film as "Attack of the fifty foot woman", spelled out, so every search for the title as it appears on the poster returns nothing. Returning nothing is what the lists have evidently done. Searching the renewal class on the single ordinary word "fifty" and reading the whole result set finds it immediately.
This is the third time the same trap has appeared in this register. Plan 9 is filed as "Plan nine from outer space" and House on Haunted Hill carries an article the film does not have. Three of the most confidently mislabeled titles on the internet are in copyright, and in all three cases the only thing standing between the belief and the fact is one word in a catalog entry.
The register, as it stands
- Renewal
- RE0000291853, registered 17 April 1986
- Renewal claimant
- Lorimar Distribution International, Inc., as proprietor of a work made for hire
- Original claimant
- Allied Artists Pictures Corporation
- Filed under the title
- Attack of the fifty foot woman
- Renewal window
- 1986, the 28th year after 1958 publication
- US copyright runs to
- the end of 2053
- Searched
- 2026-09-08
The one thing that can be said against this
The renewal was filed by Lorimar rather than by Allied Artists, the original claimant. A renewal claimed by a successor is the kind of thing that can be argued about, and we are not in a position to say whether the chain of title behind it stands up.
That is an argument about who holds the copyright, not about whether one exists. A facially valid renewal sits on the public record, filed inside the window, which is a long way from the "never renewed" repeated everywhere. It is not a film to publish on the strength of a list.
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, renewal registration RE0000291853.
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.