Is Robot Monster (1953) 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 gorilla suit with a diving helmet, shot in three days, and probably the single most reproduced "public domain" science fiction film there is.
The finding, and the working behind it
Not public domain: renewed as RE0000107158 on 6 November 1981, in copyright to the end of 2048.
The renewal names both the title and the alternate title, and credits Three Dimension Pictures as the original claimant, which is the company that made the film. It was filed in November 1981, inside the twenty-eighth year.
A second entry surfaces on the same search and is NOT this film as far as we can tell: RE0000088817, "Robot monster of Mars", renewed by Repix for Republic Productions in April 1981. Different title, different studio. We name it because anyone repeating this search will see it, and because guessing at what it covers would be exactly the sort of shortcut this register exists to avoid.
The first entry is enough on its own.
The register, as it stands
- Renewal
- RE0000107158, registered 6 November 1981
- Renewal claimant
- Medallion TV Enterprises, Inc.
- Original claimant
- Three Dimension Pictures, Inc.
- Filed under the title
- Robot monster; a.k.a. Monster from Mars
- Renewal window
- 1981, the twenty-eighth year after 1953 publication
- US copyright runs to
- the end of 2048
- Searched
- 2026-09-09
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 RE0000107158.
- Copyright Office public catalog, renewal registration RE0000088817, a separate entry.
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.