Is Tarzan’s Revenge (1938) 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, never renewed — but surely Tarzan himself is not free?
The finding, and the working behind it
Public domain in the United States: registered LP8030 in 1938 and not renewed, while eight neighboring registrations were.
The film itself was not renewed, and the bracket around it is dense: eight of the registrations either side of LP8030 were renewed in 1965 and 1966. The register was being worked and this was passed over.
The interesting part is the character rather than the film. Tarzan of the Apes was published in 1912 and in book form in 1914, and every Tarzan book published through 1930 is public domain by age in the United States.
This film adapts no particular novel. Its story is original, credited to Johnson and Vann, and uses the character. So it does not pull in a live copyright from a later book.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- LP8030, Principal Productions, 7 January 1938
- Renewal fell due
- 1965–1966
- Renewal found
- none
- Neighbors renewed
- eight other LP80xx registrations in the same volumes
- Searched
- 2026-09-19
Copyright is not the only right on a character
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. holds trademarks on the Tarzan name. Trademark is a different thing from copyright: it does not stop a public-domain film from being public domain, and it can still govern how a name is used to sell something.
The finding on this page is about copyright in the film. It is not advice about naming a product after a character.
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, Motion Pictures, for LP8030 and the LP80xx renewal run in 1965 and 1966.
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.
Watch it
Tarzan’s Revenge (1938) is free to watch here, 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.