Is The Hideous Sun Demon (1958) 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
A low-budget monster picture widely posted as free, on the usual assumption about independent films of the period.
The finding, and the working behind it
Not public domain: renewed as RE0000361389 on 17 December 1987, in copyright to the end of 2053.
Renewed on 17 December 1987, at the far end of the window available to a 1958 film, by a claimant with no obvious connection to the production company named in the entry, Clarke-King Enterprises.
Late renewals by unfamiliar parties are the signature of this whole group of records. A film being obscure, cheaply made and freely posted says nothing at all about whether somebody filed a piece of paper in the 1980s.
The register, as it stands
- Renewal
- RE0000361389, registered 17 December 1987
- Renewal claimant
- the Twenty Four Horses Company, as proprietor of a work made for hire
- Filed under the title
- The Hideous sun demon. By Clarke-King Enterprises
- US copyright runs to
- the end of 2053
- Searched
- 2026-09-07
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 RE0000361389.
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.