Is Behind Green Lights (1946) public domain?
The copyright record for this film, written out in full so you can check it.
Public domain in the United States
What is usually said
Public domain, never renewed.
The finding, and the working behind it
Public domain in the United States: registered LP156 in 1946 by Twentieth Century-Fox, and absent from the alphabetical run where its renewal would sit.
The renewal sections for 1972, 1973 and 1974 were searched by title, by LP156 and by claimant.
The 1973 volume is alphabetical, and this title falls between two renewals that are both present: Behind City Lights and Behind the Footlights. The gap between them is where a renewal of this film would have been printed, and there is nothing there.
Fox was renewing in that window, filing Leave Her to Heaven as R551217, so the absence is from a library that was being attended to.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- LP156, (C) Twentieth Century-Fox, 22 January 1946
- Renewal fell due
- 1972–1974
- Renewal found
- none
- Where it should have been
- between Behind City Lights (R548963) and Behind the Footlights (R551225)
- Searched
- 2026-09-19
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
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, cumulative Motion Pictures 1940–1949, and the AFI Catalog, for LP156.
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures 1972, 1973 and 1974, read for the renewal sections.
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 negative search proves that no record was found, which is not identical to proving that no record exists. The Copyright Office says as much about its own catalogs. Where a search could not be decisive we say so above rather than rounding it up to certainty.
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 [email protected] with what we missed and we will correct it here.
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.