Is The Bat (1959) 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.
The finding, and the working behind it
Public domain in the United States: registered LP13957, with no renewal in a window the online catalog covers completely.
This is the strongest kind of negative available, because the window it falls in is one where absence really is evidence. The Copyright Office’s online catalog is complete from 1 January 1978 onward, and a renewal for a 1959 film fell due in 1986 or 1987. If it were there we would see it.
Rather than trust an exact-title query, which is the mistake that keeps House on Haunted Hill on the free lists, we pulled every renewal registration in the motion picture class matching "bat", all 133 of them, and read the list. It is dense with renewals filed between 1986 and 1989, including the entire run of the Bat Masterson television series, so the window is demonstrably well covered.
There is no renewal of the 1959 feature in it, and no renewal record anywhere that names Liberty Pictures or Allied Artists in connection with this film.
The work underneath is public domain on age. The film comes from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s play The Bat of 1920 and her novel The Circular Staircase of 1908. There is a recorded termination notice from the Rinehart heirs, effective 31 December 1982, against Warner Bros., Allied Artists, Liberty and others, which shows those literary rights were live and being fought over at the time. They have since expired by term, so nothing is left.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- LP13957 (1959)
- How the number was confirmed
- recorded assignment, Liberty Pictures Corporation to ABC Pictures International, recordation V1662P510, 18 May 1978
- Renewal fell due
- 1986–1987
- Renewal found
- none, in 133 motion picture renewals matching "bat"
- Searched
- 2026-09-01
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, the full motion picture renewal set matching "bat".
- Copyright Office public catalog, recordation V1662P510.
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.