On 31 October 2011 15:49, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Do we need to avoid them for some special legal reason or just because we don't feel comfortable saying "Yay! This brilliant author got shot in the head defending his country 70 years ago so we can now copy his books with paying for them!"? If it's the latter, then we can probably word things sufficiently delicately.
It's a legal issue, but *only* regarding French authors (at least, I'm not immediately aware of any other countries which do the same thing). As part of a general French law regarding those killed or injured in wartime (and their dependents), authorial copyrights are extended by an additional thirty years in these cases, from seventy years after death to a hundred years after death. (A side-effect of this is that the *first* cases will become PD in a few years - 1 January 2015 for those killed during 1914.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mort_pour_la_France
French law also has an odd caveat for works which were in copyright during the two world wars; the periods of these wars are not counted for calculating expiry dates, thus meaning that some works which were still in copyright in 1939, and would have expired over the next few years, will not do so for a bit longer. Per our article, this only applies for musical works - a court recently annulled it for most works - so we can just omit French composers from our calculations!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_France