The 49th Man

The 49th Man was released in 1953 and registered for copyright by Columbia Pictures Corp. on May 12, 1953, under registration number LP2540. To maintain copyright protection under the 1909 Copyright Act, works registered between 1928 and 1963 required a manual renewal with the Copyright Office during their 28th year of protection. A thorough search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database, the US Copyright Office's Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE), and the Film Superlist: 1950-1959 shows no record of a renewal for this title. For a 1953 registration, the renewal window would have been in 1980 or 1981. While Columbia Pictures is a major studio that typically renewed its library, this specific B-movie thriller escaped renewal, likely due to oversight or lack of commercial value at the time. Consequently, the film entered the public domain in the United States when its first term expired at the end of 1981.