The Adventures of Kit Carson

The Adventures of Kit Carson was a television series produced by Revue Productions (a subsidiary of MCA) that originally aired from 1951 to 1955. While the series was frequently syndicated and repackaged in the early 1960s, its original copyright subsistence is governed by the 1909 Copyright Act, which required a renewal registration in the 28th year to extend protection to the second term of 67 years. A search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database and the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) reveals no renewal filings for the individual episodes of this series. Under the law applicable to works published before 1964, the failure to renew the copyright at the end of the first 28-year term resulted in the work entering the public domain. For this series, renewals would have been due between 1979 and 1983. The series is widely recognized as public domain by film historians and archival distributors. It is currently distributed by multiple public domain specialty labels, including Mill Creek Entertainment and Alpha Video, and is available for unrestricted download on the Internet Archive without copyright challenge from the successor-in-interest (Universal/MCA).