Is The Vampire Bat (1933) 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 LP3579 in 1933, with neither the title nor Majestic Pictures appearing anywhere in the 1960 or 1961 volumes.
The registration is confirmed twice, from the cumulative catalog and from the digitized card catalog, which agree: THE VAMPIRE BAT, 1933, 7 reels, (C) Majestic Pictures Corp., 19Jan33, LP3579. Fixing what is being searched for is the half of a negative search that usually goes missing.
The word “vampire” does not occur anywhere in either the 1960 or the 1961 motion picture volume — not in the renewals and not in the new registrations. Majestic Pictures appears nowhere in either; the only “majestic” hits are a Universal-International short called Majestic Island.
Coverage is confirmed by contemporaries. The 1960 volume contains the renewals of King Kong and Duck Soup, both 1933, and the 1961 volume contains The Invisible Man, also 1933. The 1933 renewal sections are present and the scanning is being read correctly.
One honest qualification, because this record is a different QUALITY of evidence from the 1940s titles here. The neighbor run is much sparser: the renewed L35xx numbers are L3503, L3511, L3514, L3518, L3533, L3540, L3552 and L3559, with large gaps between them. 1933 films were renewed far less systematically than 1948 films, so the bracket argument is weak on this one and the weight rests on the title and the claimant being wholly absent from both volumes. That is still good evidence. It is not the same evidence.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- LP3579, (C) Majestic Pictures Corp., 19 January 1933, 7 reels
- Production
- Producer Phil Goldstone, director Frank Strayer, screen story Edward T. Lowe
- Renewal fell due
- 1960–1961
- Renewal found
- none
- 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, cumulative Motion Pictures, and the Copyright Office digitized card catalog, which agree on LP3579.
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures 1960 and 1961, read in full.
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.