Is One Week (1920) 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

Term expiry, not non-renewal. One Week was first published in the United States in 1920; US copyright runs at most 95 years from publication, so 1920 + 95 = 2015, the term expired 31 December 2015 and the film entered the public domain on 1 January 2016. Renewal extends a term and cannot exceed that ceiling, so no renewal search can change the answer -- one was run anyway (scripts/renewal-check.py "One Week" 1920) and returned 7 exact-phrase matches, none a motion picture and none this film. archive.org licenseurl is uploader-supplied and is NOT relied on. Underlying work: an original scenario, no surviving novel or play. Full reasoning in the why_public_domain, renewal_search_run_anyway and what_is_NOT_relied_on fields of this file.

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 One Week on archive.org
Researched: 2026-09-07
What we did to the print: 183 audio description cues, Kokoro am_michael at 173 wpm, written against the frames and swept across each cue span. Score commissioned for this silent film and normalised to -16.0 LUFS before muxing. Master -16.7 LUFS, true peak -2.0 dBTP, duck 10.0 dB.

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

One Week (1920) 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.