Is The Creeping Terror (1964) 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
One of the most freely shared films on the internet, uploaded everywhere, and a fixture of public domain collections on the strength of being famously terrible.
The finding, and the working behind it
Not public domain: renewed as RE0000561567 on 17 December 1991, and a 1964 film did not need renewing to stay protected.
This one is protected twice over. A renewal registration was filed by Crown International in December 1991, inside the twenty-eighth year after 1964 publication and on the public record.
It did not need to be. The Copyright Renewal Act of 1992 made renewal AUTOMATIC for works first published between 1964 and 1977, so a 1964 film keeps its second term whether anybody filed or not. **For any film from 1964 onward, no renewal search can make it public domain** — the absence of a renewal simply does not mean what it means for a 1957 picture.
That is worth stating plainly because this film is shared more freely than almost anything else in this register. Being ridiculed, being cheap and being everywhere are not rights positions.
The register, as it stands
- Renewal
- RE0000561567, registered 17 December 1991
- Renewal claimant
- Crown International Pictures, Inc.
- Original claimant
- Bad Axe Productions
- Filed under the title
- Creeping terror
- Also protected by
- automatic renewal, which covers works first published 1964 to 1977
- 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 RE0000561567.
- Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, automatic renewal for works published 1964 to 1977.
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.