Is Impact (1949) 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 LP2266, (c) Cardinal Pictures, Inc., 1 Apr 1949, with 1948 in the notice (1949 CCE volume catalogofcopyri331213libr). Renewal fell due 1975-77, and the 1975, 1976 and 1977 volumes were all checked. In those volumes 'impact' appears only in the titles of industrial films. Cardinal Pictures and Popkin do not appear. Neighbors renewed in 1976: L2264 (NTA, R640612) and L2267 (MGM, R636741). L2266 ... Music: all 30 Michel Michelet renewals were read and none is from this film. Underlying work: an original screenplay (Jay Dratler and Dorothy Davenport, as TMDb credits them); Dratler's renewals are other works. Not searched: anything outside the United States.
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 Impact on archive.org
- Researched
- 2026-10-19
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
Impact (1949) 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.