[Commons-l] Fwd: [WikiEN-l] Cool tool that lets you check forcopyright renewals on books

[Matthew Brown]

On 4/3/07, peter green <plugwash at p10link.net> wrote:
> but how do you know that those books don't contain extracts from other copyright works that *have*
> been renewed?

Books generally state if contents have been published before in other
forms.  Photographs and to a lesser degree illustrations may be
problematic, however; these are normally attributed, but it's
generally quite hard to tell if photographs have been independently
copyrighted, AFAIK.

Some photographs were submitted to the Library of Congress in the US
as part of copyright registration of a photograph collection, but I
suspect this was far from a universal copyright.  Since in pre Berne
Convention US copyright law things were not 'born copyrighted' but had
to be registered and published with a copyright claim, in most cases
there is no independent photograph copyright, however.

-Matt