Is The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) 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
Listed as public domain nearly everywhere, and for once the record agrees. It is here because the search that cleared it also returned a near miss worth naming.
The finding, and the working behind it
Public domain in the United States: no renewal exists. The one record on "yucca" is a different film entirely.
One renewal registration in the motion picture class contains the word "yucca", and it is not this film. RE0000397973 is Ghost of Yucca Flats, produced by Revue Studios and renewed by Universal in October 1988. Revue was Universal television. Different title, different producer, different picture.
Our verifier flagged that record as a possible match and a human read rejected it, which is exactly the division of labour it is built for. A tool deciding on its own would have marked this film renewed on the strength of one shared word.
The date is what makes the negative worth anything. A 1961 film fell due for renewal in 1988 or 1989, years the online catalog covers completely, so an empty result here means something. The same search against a 1948 film would not.
The register, as it stands
- Original release
- 1961
- Renewal fell due
- 1988 or 1989, the twenty-eighth year
- Renewal found
- none
- Search
- "yucca", renewal class, motion pictures — 1 record, read
- The record that is NOT it
- RE0000397973, Ghost of Yucca Flats, Revue Studios, renewed by Universal in 1988
- Why the negative can be trusted
- a 1961 renewal window sits entirely inside the online catalog, which begins in 1978
- Searched
- 2026-09-09
What this search does and does not cover
The renewal registrations for the film. A score, a song or an underlying story 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 catalog, renewal class, motion pictures, query "yucca".
- Copyright Office public catalog, renewal registration RE0000397973, a different film.
- 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.