Is Reefer Madness (1936) 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
Public domain. Everyone says so, and the usual reason given is a defective copyright notice.
The finding, and the working behind it
Public domain in the United States: no registration under any of its three titles in the 1912–1939 cumulative catalog, and no renewal in any volume from 1957 to 1978.
The film was made in 1936 as Tell Your Children, recut and reissued for the exploitation circuit, and it is best known today under the Reefer Madness title. All three names were searched, and so were the producers Dwain Esper and George Hirliman.
The registration itself is missing. There is no entry for the film in the cumulative catalog that covers 1912 to 1939, which is the volume a 1936 feature would appear in.
Esper does appear in the record, which is what makes the absence meaningful rather than a gap in our reading: his 1975 renewal R606245 is for a different, later film. He knew how to file one, and none was filed for this.
The reason usually given for this film being free is that the print carried a defective copyright notice. We did not verify the notice ourselves, and the verdict above does not rest on it. It rests on there being neither a registration nor a renewal to find.
The register, as it stands
- Registered as
- nothing found, under Reefer Madness, Tell Your Children or Doped Youth
- Renewal found
- none, under any title or claimant
- Volumes read
- the cumulative Motion Pictures 1912–1939, and every renewal volume 1957–1978
- Searched
- 2026-09-19
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
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, cumulative Motion Pictures 1912–1939, searched under all three titles.
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures renewal sections, 1957 through 1978.
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 [email protected] 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.