Is Dementia 13 public domain?
The evidence we relied on to restore, describe and publish it — in full, so you can check it.
Rights basis on record
The finding, and the working behind it
No renewal registration exists for this film. Copyright Office public records searched 24 Sep 2026 (renewals fell due 1990-91, inside the online catalog): 'Dementia 13' exact phrase 0 renewals; distinctive words 1, RE0000572447, 'Dementia', a song by Johnny Smith, unrelated; with Filmgroup 0; with the alternate title The Haunted and the Hunted 0. The trap on this title: the two motion-picture renewals matching 'dementia', filed by Raymond Rohauer, renew John Parker's Dementia of 1953 (Daughter of Horror), a different picture. Weaker than most records here, stated rather than buried: no original registration was located (not in the 1963 or 1964 motion picture volumes, and the recordations carry no registration number), which is consistent with a film never registered.
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.
The copy, and what we changed
- The print we started from
- The source print for Dementia 13 on archive.org
- Researched
- 2026-09-25
- What we did to the print
- 284 described cues across a 74 minute 50 second runtime, filling 24 minutes 35 seconds of gaps between dialogue -- 32.9 percent of the film -- at 177 words per minute.; Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.; The original soundtrack was repaired from the Archive copy: rumble filtered below 60 Hz, loudness matched in two passes. No picture restoration on this pass.; Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.
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.
Restoring a public domain film gives nobody any new rights over the film, including us: this print is free to take, use and pass on, exactly as the original is.
The audio description is not part of that. It is an original work written and recorded by Always on Top Entertainment LLC — free to listen to here, and licensed separately for reuse. If you hold a right in this film and we have it wrong, write to [email protected] and we will take it down while we check.
Watch it
Dementia 13 is free to watch here, restored and audio described, with no account and no advertising.
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.