Adventure Island

Adventure Island, a 1947 production released by Paramount Pictures, fell into the public domain due to a failure to renew its copyright after the initial 28-year term. The film was originally registered with the US Copyright Office on August 13, 1947, under the number LP1214. Under the 1909 Copyright Act, works published with notice between 1928 and 1963 required a manual renewal filing during the 28th year of the copyright term to extend protection to the full 95-year duration. A search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database and the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) reveals no renewal registration for this title. The copyright would have needed to be renewed in 1974 or 1975 to remain protected. Because no renewal was filed, the film's US copyright expired and it entered the public domain on January 1, 1976. This status is corroborated by David Pierce's 'Motion Picture Copyrights and Renewals 1950-1959' and the 'Film Superlist' series by D. Richard Baer, which lists the film as having a non-renewed copyright. The film's presence in the catalogs of known public domain distributors like Alpha Video and its availability on Archive.org further confirm its status. While the original story by Robert Louis Stevenson ('The Ebb-Tide') was also in the public domain at the time of filming, the specific 1947 cinematic adaptation is legally public domain in the United States due to these procedural lapses.