Bad Man of Deadwood

The film was released in 1941 and registered for copyright by Republic Pictures Corp. on September 5, 1941 (registration number LP10756). Under the Copyright Act of 1909, works registered between 1928 and 1963 required a manual renewal filing with the U.S. Copyright Office during the 28th year of the original term to maintain protection. A thorough search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database, the U Penn Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) online, and the Film Superlist (Hurst/Baer) yields no record of renewal for this title. For a 1941 registration, the renewal window would have occurred in 1968 or 1969. While Republic Pictures renewed many of their high-profile Roy Rogers titles, this specific film (starring Roy Rogers and George 'Gabby' Hayes) was allowed to lapse into the public domain. The film is widely available on public domain aggregators such as Alpha Video and Internet Archive, and it frequently appears in multi-film 'PD' western box sets without legal challenge from the successor-in-interest to Republic's library (Paramount/Melange), confirming its status as a public domain work due to non-renewal.