Is Horrors of Spider Island (1960) 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
There is no United States copyright registration for this film of any kind, which is why every public domain site lists it.
The finding, and the working behind it
Not public domain: a German film whose US copyright was restored by treaty on 1 January 1996, in copyright to 2055.
This one fails for a reason that has nothing to do with renewal, and it is the reason most likely to catch anybody out twice. There genuinely is no US registration for the film. We searched under the German title, under the English title, under the producer, and in the digitised card catalog. Nothing. Under the old rules that made it public domain here, and that is exactly why the free film sites carry it.
The Uruguay Round Agreements Act ended that on 1 January 1996. Foreign works that had fallen into the United States public domain purely by failing to observe US formalities had their US copyright restored automatically on that date, provided they were still under copyright at home. Germany’s term is the life of the author plus seventy years. Böttger lived from 1902 to 1981, so the film was firmly in copyright in Germany in 1996 and qualified.
The American release came almost two years after the German one, so the thirty-day simultaneous-publication exception, which would have made it a United States work, does not apply. Restoration required no filing and produced no document, which is why searching for one finds nothing and proves nothing.
The general rule is worth more than this title. The renewal test does not work on foreign films and never did. A film made outside the United States that looks free because nobody ever registered it here is the exact profile of a work the URAA restored, so the treaty question has to be asked before the renewal question.
The register, as it stands
- Original title
- Ein Toter hing im Netz, written and directed by Fritz Böttger
- Producer
- Rapid-Film / Intercontinental
- Released
- West Germany, 16 April 1960; United States, March 1962
- US registration
- none, under either title or the producer, in the catalog or the card catalog
- Restored
- automatically, on 1 January 1996, under the URAA
- US copyright runs to
- the end of 2055
- Searched
- 2026-09-01
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
- 17 U.S.C. §104A, the restoration provision enacted by the Uruguay Round Agreements Act.
- Copyright Office public catalog, searched under both titles and the producer; no records.
- Copyright Office digitized card catalog, searched likewise; no records.
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.