Chicago Confidential

Chicago Confidential was released in 1957 and registered for copyright by Peerless Productions, Inc., on August 21, 1957, with the registration number LP9137. Under the 1909 Copyright Act, works registered between 1928 and 1963 required a manual renewal filing with the Copyright Office during the 28th year of the first term to extend protection to a second term. For this film, the renewal window opened in 1984 and closed at the end of 1985. A search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database, the U.S. Copyright Office online records, and the Film Superlist (by Hurst and Baer) indicates that no renewal was ever filed for this title. Because the copyright was not renewed, the film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 1986. The film is widely available on public domain aggregators and has been released by multiple budget home video labels (such as Alpha Video) that specialize in expired copyrights, which corroborates the lack of a valid renewal record.