Is I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) 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
One of the most-copied drive-in titles there is, posted freely for decades and listed as public domain almost everywhere it appears.
The finding, and the working behind it
Not public domain: renewed as RE0000260915 on 15 October 1985, in copyright to the end of 2052.
Renewed on 15 October 1985 by Selma Enterprises, against an original entry naming Sunset Productions.
This is the earliest of the three Selma renewals we have found and it reads as the start of a program rather than a one-off: Teenage Cave Man followed in February 1986 and The Brain Eaters in April. All three are American International pictures, and all three are on public domain lists today.
The lesson generalises past this film. A studio that stopped filing did not necessarily leave its library free -- somebody else may have filed for it, twenty years later, and the catalog entry is under the production company you have never heard of rather than the name on the poster.
The register, as it stands
- Renewal
- RE0000260915, registered 15 October 1985
- Renewal claimant
- Selma Enterprises, as proprietor of a work made for hire
- Filed under the title
- I was a teenage werewolf; motion picture. By Sunset Productions, Inc.
- Original producer
- Sunset Productions, Inc., for American International
- US copyright runs to
- the end of 2052
- Searched
- 2026-09-07
The one thing that can be said against this
Selma Enterprises is not American International and not Sunset Productions. A renewal filed by a later party can be attacked, and we are not in a position to judge whether the chain of title behind it holds.
But that is an argument about who owns the copyright, not about whether one exists. A facially valid renewal sits on the public record and the film is not ours to publish on the strength of a list that never looked.
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, renewal registration RE0000260915.
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.