Charlie Chan's Secret

Charlie Chan's Secret was released by 20th Century-Fox in early 1936 (registered for copyright on January 10, 1936, under LP6074). Under the 1909 Copyright Act, works from this era required a formal renewal filing in the 28th year of their first term to maintain protection. For this film, the renewal window opened in 1963 and closed at the end of 1964. A search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database, the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE), and David Pierce's 'Motion Picture Copyrights and Renewals 1950–1959' (and 1960–1969 equivalents) reveals no renewal record for this title. While Fox renewed many other Charlie Chan titles from the same period, this specific entry was overlooked, likely due to a clerical error during the studio merger/transition era or a perceived lack of commercial value at the time. Because the copyright was not renewed within the statutory 28-year window, the film's US copyright expired, and it entered the public domain in 1964. This status is widely recognized by film historians and is why the film appears frequently in public domain DVD collections and on legitimate archive websites such as the Internet Archive without copyright challenges.