---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Inside Google Book Search <inside-book-search(a)google.com>
Date: Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 2:54 PM
Subject: [Inside Google Book Search] U.S. copyright renewal records
available for down...
To: inside-google-book-search(a)googlegroups.com
Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager, Google Book Search
If I handed you a book and asked whether it was in copyright or in the
public domain, you'd probably turn to the copyright page first.
Unfortunately, a copyright page can't answer that question definitively --
at best, it could tell you when the book in your hands was published, and
who owned the rights to it at that time. Ownership can change, though:
rights revert back to authors, and after enough time has passed, the book
enters into the public domain, letting people copy and adapt it as they
wish.
So how much time is "enough"? It
varies<http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/>n/>,
often depending on the country, on when the book was published, and whether
the author is living. For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the
rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing
the copyright 28 years after publication. In most
cases<http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/#Footnote_10>10>,
books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how
many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't
renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published
between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable.
How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S.
Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see
http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The
Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon
scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless
folks at Project Gutenberg <http://pg.net> and the Distributed
Proofreaders<http://www.pgdp.net/c/>painstakingly typed in every word.
Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've
gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier
parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download
here<http://dl.google.com/rights/books/renewals/google-renewals-20080516…
.
There are undoubtedly errors in these records, but we believe this is the
best and most comprehensive set of renewal records available today. These
records are free and in the public domain, and we hope you're able to use
them to determine the copyright status of books that interest you.
At Google, we're committed to making as many books available online to users
as possible while respecting copyright, and this is one example of that
commitment. Watch this space for more to come.
--
Posted By Inside Google Book Search to Inside Google Book
Search<http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2008/06/us-copyright-renewal-recor…
6/23/2008 09:45:00 A
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