Search any work of art or character to find if it’s actually free to use. Every determination is sourced, version-aware, and confidence-rated — not a forum guess.
The Bela Lugosi screen performance clears the 95-year US term. The novel itself has been free for decades — this is the film, specifically.
One section per kind of question. Each card shows what it actually holds today — a real count, a real date, or the real state of the sources behind it.
Characters have no source API. Every entry is hand-compiled from case law and publication history — a status that only resolved in 2023, a character free in one design and protected in every later one, a novel that is free while its film is not.
Dated transitions, each one sourced to the character record that carries its citations — not reported independently of it.
Four passes, in order: pin the version, apply the US term rule, split trademark from copyright, then cite it and score it. Three status values, three confidence values, nothing asserted without a source.
A first-pass search, not a curated catalogue: results are fetched at request time and filtered on each archive’s own rights field before they reach the page. The two held back are held for a reason — Wikimedia returned CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain, and loc.gov’s rights field has never been read.
Right isn’t enough. You have to be able to prove it.
Every determination is sourced, dated, and built to be checked
Open