2009/1/12 geni geniice@gmail.com:
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.
We don't use the copyright not renewed clause stuff and commons' general support for Must be PD in the country of origin as well as the US means we mostly dodge the issue.
I'm not so sure that we don't use it - I can't cite chapter and verse, but I've certainly seen it invoked here and there, usually with good-faith due diligence to find renewals.
Sometimes it seems like what we need is a quasi-intelligent "PD-old" template - you plug in the known variables, date created and date published and author and country and so on, and it spits out "is therefore public domain because X and Y, under provision Z". Be horrific to maintain, though.