[WikiEN-l] Cool tool that lets you check for copyright renewals on books

[Ray Saintonge]

Fastfission wrote:

>This is a new, neat tool that helps you find whether certain US
>published books are out of copyright even if they are published after
>1923. As most copyright savvy people know, there was a period of time
>after that in which copyrights had to be officially renewed to stay
>valid, meaning that a lot of works published after that time are
>officially in the public domain in the United States. But these are
>hard to find, since renewal notices are hard to peruse and in many
>cases not machine-searchable at all.
>
>But no longer! Stanford has created a Copyright Renewal Database,
>making it quite easy to check if any book published first in the U.S.
>between 1923 and 1963 are in the public domain. It could potentially
>clear up copyright ambiguities for certain things taken from these
>works.
>
>http://collections.stanford.edu/copyrightrenewals/
>  
>
It's a good beginning, but only includes book renewals.  I hope that 
they take it further to cover magazines.

Ec