Is Dressed to Kill (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 LP360 in 1946, and missing from the 1973 volume in which Universal renewed nearly all of its other 1946 features.
This is the last of the fourteen Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. It is not Brian De Palma’s 1980 film of the same name, which is in copyright.
The evidence here is unusually strong because Universal renewed nearly its whole 1946 slate in the 1973 volume, on the same days, in the same sequence. This film is missing from that sweep by title and by LP360, and so is Terror by Night.
The only Dressed to Kill renewal on record belongs to a different studio’s film of the same name, which is exactly the trap the registration number exists to avoid.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- LP360, (C) Universal Pictures Co., Inc., 13 May 1946
- Renewal fell due
- 1973–1974
- Renewal found
- none
- Universal renewals filed 4 September 1973
- The Spider Woman Strikes Back (R560616) and The Killers (R560650)
- 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, for LP360.
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures 1973, read for the Universal renewal sequence.
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.
Watch it
Dressed to Kill (1946) is free to watch here, 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.