Champagne Charlie

Under the Copyright Act of 1909, works published between 1928 and 1963 required a renewal filing with the US Copyright Office during the 28th year of their first term to remain protected. 'Champagne Charlie' was registered for copyright by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp on May 8, 1936 (Registration No. LP6367). A search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database and the relevant volumes of the Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) reveals no renewal registration for this title. Fox, like many studios of the era, failed to renew a significant percentage of their 'B-unit' productions from the mid-1930s. In the absence of a renewal filing in 1963 or 1964, the copyright expired at the end of its first 28-year term, and the film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 1965. This specific 1936 production (directed by James Tinling) is distinct from the 1944 British Ealing Studios film of the same name, which may have different status under URAA restoration rules. The 1936 US production is widely cited in public domain filmographies such as Film Superlist (Hurst) as having failed to renew.