Is The File on Thelma Jordon (1949) 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
Public domain, never renewed — nothing for it appears in the Copyright Office online catalog at all.
The finding, and the working behind it
In copyright: registered L2455 in 1949 and renewed as R638187 on 5 August 1976 by Paramount, which still lists it as a current title because it is one.
The register entry reads: R638187. The File on Thelma Jordan. By Wallis-Hazen, Inc. (C) 1Aug49; L2455. Paramount Pictures Corporation (PWH); 5Aug76; R638187. That is the whole answer, and two separate things hide it.
The first is the date. The renewal was filed in August 1976, seventeen months before the Copyright Office online catalog begins. Searching that catalog for this film returns ZERO records of any type — not the renewal, not the original registration, not an assignment or a recordation. A film with no trace online looks abandoned. This one is owned by Paramount.
The second is the spelling. The film is Thelma Jordon on its own posters and in every reference work. The Copyright Office cataloged it as Thelma Jordan. An exact-title search misses it in the printed volumes too, which is how a title can be searched for honestly and still come back clean.
It sits in the register between My Friend Irma (R638186) and The Fountainhead (R638350), in the middle of a Paramount and Warner renewal batch filed the same week. Nobody forgot this one.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- L2455, copyright date 1 August 1949, by Wallis-Hazen, Inc.
- Renewal
- R638187, registered 5 August 1976
- Renewal claimant
- Paramount Pictures Corporation, as proprietor of a work made for hire
- Cataloged as
- The File on Thelma Jordan, with an a
- US copyright runs to
- the end of 2044, 95 years from 1949
- 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
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures January–December 1976 (archive.org 1976motionpictur3301213libr).
- Copyright Office public catalog, which returns nothing for this film — the trap rather than the answer.
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.