On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:
2009, 60 years after Gandhi's death. The translator is Hélène Hart, she never wrote nor translated anything else beside this book, and her date of death is not known, even to the French National Library (BNF). I personaly called the BNF to ask for details. The book was published only once in 1924, and is out of print since then. If even the BNF does not know anything about Hélène Hart, I doubt anybody else knows it.
I understand that Swedish book publishers in cases like these publish the book anyway, and if the copyright holder contacts them later there is a standard compensation paid out, based on the number of sold copies. This means that the copyright holder who comes too late and makes the claim after publication can get compensated but can't negotiate the price and can't veto the publication. For the publisher it's not hard to do the math: Just set aside the small amount of money for every printed copy. This is apparently a workable solution for the book printing business.
I have tried to figure out if and how this could work for online, non-profit projects. Economic compensation is ruled out for two reasons: 1) there is no money that can be set aside or paid, and 2) we most often don't know how many readers we have, so we can't compute the size of the renumeration anyway. The only workable approach seems to be to allow the late-coming copyright holder a veto, i.e. to take down the work upon request. This is similar to what the Internet Archive or Google are doing.
In many cases, where the copyright that we thought had expired is still in force, it will soon expire anyway. For example, if we publish a work by what we thought was an anonymous author, and it turns out that they died 55 years ago, the take-down will just be a temporary removal for 15 years, and then the copyright will really have expired. Still, such a removal is unfortunate and complicated. I think we can help this by clearly announcing who insisted on the removal (rather than granting a free license, which was their alternative option), so that the bad will reflects on them. The non-profit has the advantage of being the good guys.
Some might argue that you should always walk on the safe side of copyright, always have good margins and never get into trouble. However, there is no safe side. Even if Mark Twain died (in 1910) more than 70 years ago, and I publish his works in the best of faith, some person might turn up tomorrow and claim that their Dutch grandfather who died only 65 years ago was actually a secret co-author of that work, and that copyright in the Netherlands is still in force. You can never be completely safe.
Robert Rohde wrote:
As a matter of law, the US says you can assume that a work is in the public domain 120 years after creation (with some exceptions),
Really? Can you provide any sources for that statement?