Is Missile to the Moon (1958) 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
A remake of Cat-Women of the Moon, circulating on the same public domain discs as the film it remakes, and labelled free for the same reason: nobody looked.
The finding, and the working behind it
Not public domain: renewed as RE0000247361 on 14 May 1985, in copyright to the end of 2053.
Filed in May 1985, inside the window, under the exact title on the poster. Twenty-eight renewal registrations contain "missile" and this is one of them.
The claimant is the third appearance of the same name in this register. Wade Williams renewed Cat-Women of the Moon in 1982, this film in 1985, and Plan 9 from Outer Space in 1986. Three of the most confidently mislabeled science fiction titles in circulation, one claimant, four years.
The remake detail is almost too neat. This film reuses the plot and the costumes of Cat-Women of the Moon, and both of them were renewed by the same person, and both of them appear on public domain lists to this day.
The register, as it stands
- Renewal
- RE0000247361, registered 14 May 1985
- Renewal claimant
- Wade Williams 3d
- Original claimant
- Astor Pictures Corporation
- Filed under the title
- Missile to the Moon
- Renewal window
- 1985 to 1986, the twenty-eighth year after 1958 publication
- US copyright runs to
- the end of 2053
- Searched
- 2026-09-09
The one thing that can be said against this
The renewal was filed by Wade Williams rather than by Astor Pictures, the original claimant. A renewal taken by a later party can be argued about, and we cannot say whether the chain of title behind it holds up.
That is a question about who owns the copyright, not whether one exists. A filed renewal sits on the public record, which is a long way from nothing.
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 RE0000247361.
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.