Is Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) 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
A staple of cheap science fiction compilations and public domain streaming channels, and often the first title anybody names when they want a free 1950s space picture.
The finding, and the working behind it
Not public domain: renewed as RE0000136473 on 31 August 1982, in copyright to the end of 2048.
Filed in August 1982, inside the window, and entered with the alternate title "Rocket to the moon" alongside the one on the poster.
**The claimant is the name from the Plan 9 record.** Wade H. Williams appears here in 1982 and again on Plan 9 from Outer Space in 1986. That is the pattern this register keeps running into: a small number of people spent the early eighties renewing science fiction and horror titles whose original owners had stopped paying attention, and those are precisely the films every list now calls free.
The same caveat applies as on Plan 9. A renewal filed by a party other than the original claimant can be argued about, and we are not in a position to say whether the chain of title stands up. It is still a filed renewal on the public record, which is a different thing from nothing at all.
The register, as it stands
- Renewal
- RE0000136473, registered 31 August 1982
- Renewal claimant
- Wade H. Williams 3d
- Original claimant
- Z. M. Productions
- Filed under the title
- Cat-women of the moon; a.k.a. Rocket to the moon
- Renewal window
- 1981 to 1982, the twenty-eighth year after 1953 publication
- US copyright runs to
- the end of 2048
- Searched
- 2026-09-09
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 RE0000136473.
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.