August Week End

August Week End was released in 1936 by Chesterfield Motion Pictures Corporation, a 'Poverty Row' studio. Under the Copyright Act of 1909, works published between 1928 and 1963 required a renewal filing with the U.S. Copyright Office during the 28th year of their first term to maintain protection. A search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database, the Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE), and the Film Superlist (Hurst/Baer) yields no record of renewal for this title. Because the copyright was not renewed in 1963 or 1964, the work entered the public domain upon the expiration of its initial 28-year term. The film is widely recognized as public domain by film historians and is frequently included in public domain collections and on archives like the Internet Archive without challenge. Most Chesterfield productions from this era met the same fate as the studio's assets were not consistently maintained after its dissolution.