Alice's Egg Plant

Under the Copyright Act of 1909, works published between 1923 and 1963 required a renewal filing in the 28th year of their copyright term to remain protected. Alice's Egg Plant was part of the Alice Comedies series produced by Walt Disney and distributed by Margaret J. Winkler. While it was registered for copyright at the time of its release (under entry LP21477 on May 17, 1925), a search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database and the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) reveals no renewal registration for this specific title. According to the Film Superlist: Motion Pictures in the U.S. Public Domain (1894–1939), many of the early Disney shorts, including various Alice Comedies, failed to have their copyrights renewed either by the Disney studio or the distributor at the expiration of the first term. Because the renewal was a mandatory requirement for works of this era, the failure to file resulted in the film entering the public domain in the United States in 1953 (28 years after the original 1925 registration).