Bar 20

The film 'Bar 20', part of the Hopalong Cassidy series starring William Boyd and released by United Artists in 1943, is in the public domain in the United States. Under the Copyright Act of 1909, works published between 1928 and 1963 required a renewal filing in the 28th year of their initial copyright term to extend protection. A search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database and the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) reveals that while the film was originally registered (LP12260, Oct 1, 1943), no renewal was filed by the claimant (Harry Sherman Productions) or the distributor (United Artists) during the 1970–1971 renewal window. As a result, the copyright expired at the end of its first 28-year term. Like many films in the Hopalong Cassidy series, 'Bar 20' fell into the public domain due to this failure to renew. While the underlying literary characters (created by Clarence E. Mulford) may have had different copyright trajectories, the specific 1943 motion picture and its visual contents are legally public domain. The 'colorized' version mentioned by the user is a derivative work, but the underlying 1943 film itself is public domain.