Andrew Gray wrote: > [posted to commons-l and wikien-l; someone may want to forward it to > wikisource-l, perhaps?] > > I've just run across this article, which might be of use in helping > those who work on the eternal problem of determining whether or not a > given 20th-century work is in copyright in the US. > > http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july08/hirtle/07hirtle.html > > Copyright Renewal, Copyright Restoration, and the Difficulty of > Determining Copyright Status - Peter B. Hirtle, Cornell University > > D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2008 > Volume 14 Number 7/8 > > "It has long been assumed that most of the works published from 1923 > to 1964 in the US are currently in the public domain. Both non-profit > and commercial digital libraries have dreamed of making this material > available. Most programs have recognized as well that the restoration > of US copyright in foreign works in 1996 has made it impossible for > them to offer to the public the full text of most foreign works. What > has been overlooked up to now is the difficulty that copyright > restoration has created for anyone trying to determine if a work > published in the United States is still protected by copyright. This > paper discusses the impact that copyright restoration of foreign works > has had on US copyright status investigations, and offers some new > steps that users must follow in order to investigate the copyright > status in the US of any work. It argues that copyright restoration has > made it almost impossible to determine with certainty whether a book > published in the United States after 1922 and before 1964 is in the > public domain. Digital libraries that wish to offer books from this > period do so at some risk." > > The minefield is even murkier than we thought, it seems. >
The unabridged version is at http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/10884/6/Copyright_renewal_final.pdf The trimming was all from the segment on "Risk management and copyright restoration" We really *never* can be sure about the copyright status of anything, and a risk management approach may be preferable. Ec _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l