Is His Girl Friday (1940) 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
Original registration: Columbia Pictures Corp., 30 Dec 1939, LP9305. Renewal fell due 1966-1968, before the online catalog, so the printed Catalog of Copyright Entries renewal volumes were read (front-end seat, 19 Sep 2026). On 13 Nov 1967 Columbia renewed the films registered either side of it in late December 1939 -- Music in My Heart (LP9306, R421611) and My Son Is Guilty (LP9307, R421610) -- and did not renew LP9305. No renewal of His Girl Friday in 1966-1968 or any later year. Not searched: the underlying play The Front Page (Hecht and MacArthur, 1928), music, or anything outside the United States. Copy: the Archive's his-girl-friday-1940, a laserdisc rip (Mike chose it over the 2005 DVD rip), 720x480; the side join and splice losses noted at intake.
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 His Girl Friday on archive.org
- Researched
- 2026-10-01
- What we did to the print
- 72 described cues across a 91 minute 50 second runtime, filling 3 minutes 42 seconds of gaps between dialogue -- 4.1 percent of the film -- at 158 words per minute. The film is wall-to-wall overlapping dialogue; the description goes only where the dialogue leaves room.; Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.; The original soundtrack was repaired from the laserdisc copy: rumble filtered below 60 Hz, the top end rolled off above 7 kHz, loudness matched in two passes.; Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.; Captioned verbatim: 1,877 cues, every disputed line ruled by Mike.
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
His Girl Friday (1940) 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.