Is Last Woman on Earth (1960) public domain?
The copyright record for this film, written out in full so you can check it.
Public domain in the United States
What is usually said
Corman shot it in Puerto Rico, Robert Towne wrote it and acts in it under a pseudonym, and it circulates freely.
The finding, and the working behind it
Public domain in the United States: no renewal exists. The renewal class returns 407 records on "woman" and none is this film.
Four hundred and seven renewal registrations contain "woman" in the motion picture class. The count is exact rather than a floor, the whole set was read, and this film is not in it.
Four hundred is past the point where reading by eye is reliable, which is why the set is fetched whole and matched by rule rather than skimmed. The rule is deliberately generous — it would rather flag a film that is not ours than miss one that is — and every flag it raises is read by a person before anything is written down.
Towne’s screenplay is the thing to think about here rather than the film. He wrote it, and a screenplay can be separately registered; that is not the same question as whether the picture was renewed, and only the picture was searched.
The register, as it stands
- Original release
- 1960, Filmgroup
- Renewal fell due
- 1987 or 1988, the twenty-eighth year
- Renewal found
- none
- Search
- "woman", renewal class, motion pictures — 407 records, all read
- Checked
- 7 September 2026
- Searched
- 2026-09-07
What this search does and does not cover
The renewal registrations for the film. The screenplay, any music and any underlying material can carry their own copyrights and were not searched here.
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 records API, renewal class, motion pictures, query "woman".
- Method: outreach/PD-VERIFICATION.md; verifier: scripts/pd-verify.ts.
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.
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.
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.