The Devil and Leroy Bassett

The film was released in 1973. Under the 1909 Copyright Act, works published between 1964 and 1977 received an automatic second term of copyright, but they still required a valid copyright notice upon publication and (ideally) an initial registration to be enforceable. A search of the U.S. Copyright Office records and the Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) does not reveal an original registration for this title under its primary name or known alternates during the 1970s. More importantly, the film is widely documented as having been distributed without a valid copyright notice on the release prints, a common occurrence for independent low-budget productions of this era. It has been extensively circulated in the 'Public Domain' market for decades by distributors such as Alpha Video and is hosted on the Internet Archive's community video section without takedown claims from any rights holder. Given the lack of a timely registration and the presence of the film in known public domain catalogs, it is categorized as public domain due to failure to comply with notice requirements.