Africa Before Dark

Africa Before Dark is an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit animated short produced by Walt Disney and distributed by Universal Pictures. The film was originally released on February 20, 1928. Under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1909, works published in 1928 required a copyright renewal in the 28th year following publication to maintain protection (specifically, a filing between 1955 and 1956). A search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database and the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries for the appropriate time period finds no record of a renewal for this specific film. While many Oswald shorts were renewed, Africa Before Dark was one of several 'lost' films of the era that did not receive a timely renewal. As the copyright was not renewed, the work entered the public domain in the United States upon the expiration of its first term in 1956. This public domain status is widely recognized by film historians and archives, including the Internet Archive and various Disney-specific research databases, which note that the film was rediscovered in an Austrian archive in 2017 after having been lost for decades.