On 31 October 2011 15:49, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)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
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk