Is Please Murder Me (1956) 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
Angela Lansbury and Raymond Burr the year before Perry Mason, and on every public domain list going.
The finding, and the working behind it
Public domain in the United States: no renewal exists. The renewal class returns 294 records on "murder" and none is this film.
Two hundred and ninety-four renewal registrations contain "murder" in the motion picture class. The count is exact, the whole set was read, and this film is not in it.
Two entries in that set are worth naming because they are the near misses: "Murder me twice", renewed by Universal City Studios, and "Murder for me", also Universal. Neither is this film. A reader checking our working will meet them, and a title that shares two words with ours is exactly the kind of thing that gets mistaken for a hit.
Burr is the reason to be careful here. He was a working contract actor in 1956 and a television property from 1957, and studios renewed around properties that were still earning. This one was not renewed anyway.
The register, as it stands
- Original release
- 1956, Distributors Corporation of America
- Renewal fell due
- 1983 or 1984, the twenty-eighth year
- Renewal found
- none
- Search
- "murder", renewal class, motion pictures — 294 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. A score or a song can carry its own copyright and its own renewal, and those 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 "murder".
- 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.