Is Inner Sanctum (1948) public domain?
The evidence we relied on to restore, describe and publish it — in full, so you can check it.
Public domain in the United States
The finding, and the working behind it
US public domain: registered (c) M.R.S. Pictures, Inc., 18 Sep 1948, LP2023 -- found in the Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures 1948, corroborated in the Copyright Office Cumulative Motion Pictures 1940-1949 p.183. NOT RENEWED: the CCE renewal sections (Classes L and M) for 1973-1977 were searched in full text and LP2023 appears in none; the alphabetical index runs straight from "Inner light" to "An Innocent affair". The adjacent registration LP2022 (Appointment with Murder, the sibling Film Classics release) WAS renewed by National Telefilm Associates on 2 Feb 1976, R625108 -- NTA ran a systematic renewal program over that library and did not renew this title. First term expired 1976. Screenplay was ORIGINAL (Jerome Todd Gollard), not adapted from Simon and Schuster, so only the title was licensed and titles are not copyrightable. No separately renewed score. All eleven federal INNER SANCTUM trademarks are dead. Limitation: the CCE carries its own disclaimer that it may not reflect the complete Copyright Office record; absolute certainty would need a paid Copyright Office search. Verified 1 Sep 2026.
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 Inner Sanctum on archive.org
- Researched
- 2026-09-02
- What we did to the print
- deflicker; measured tone curve (levels ran 39-86% of range); deband; contrast-adaptive sharpen at 0.4; 215 audio description cues, Kokoro am_michael at 166 wpm, seated by measured length in measured pauses, 0 collisions; delivery mix -16.1 LUFS / -2.0 dBTP; title card joined without re-encoding the picture
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 mike@tapeterritory.com and we will take it down while we check.
Watch it
Inner Sanctum (1948) 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.