Is Dementia 13 (1963) 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 — though a renewal under a near-identical title does exist, filed by a famously litigious rights holder.
The finding, and the working behind it
No renewal registration exists, and the two that look like one renew a different film entirely. Weaker evidence than most records here, and it says so.
The trap on this title is a near-collision, and it is the reason a careless search concludes the film is owned. There are exactly two renewal registrations in the motion picture class matching “dementia”, both filed by Raymond Rohauer, and both renew John Parker’s Dementia of 1953 — also known as Daughter of Horror — an entirely different picture. Finding a renewal filed by a famously litigious rights holder and stopping there is how this film gets called owned.
The alternate release title, The Haunted and the Hunted, returns no renewal either.
Why this is weaker than most records here, stated rather than buried: no original registration was located for the picture. It is not in the 1963 or 1964 motion picture volumes, and the many Dementia 13 recordation documents carry no registration number at all — unlike A Bucket of Blood, whose recordations helpfully carry “/LP15269” in the title field. That is consistent with a film that was never registered, in which case renewal is moot and it is free. But it means the negative is being proved about a thing that was never pinned down, the same weakness flagged on Night Tide.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- not located — see below
- Renewal fell due
- 1991–1992, entirely inside the online catalog
- Renewal found
- none for this film
- The near-collision
- RE0000092947 and RE0000092948, filed 18 May 1981 by Raymond Rohauer, renewing LP12419 and LP12505 from December 1953
- Searched
- 2026-09-01
There is live traffic on this title
Recordation documents run from 1979 through at least 2018, and Lionsgate released a 4K restoration. The plain 1963 picture is the only thing this record covers: nothing derived from that restoration, and nothing from Coppola’s later re-edit, which are separate works with separate owners.
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, motion picture renewal class searched for “dementia” and for the alternate title.
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures 1963 and 1964, searched without finding an original registration.
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 mike@tapeterritory.com 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.