[Commons-l] Interesting article on restored copyrights in US works between 1923 and 1964

[Andrew Gray]

[posted to commons-l and wikien-l; someone may want to forward it to
wikisource-l, perhaps?]

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.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july08/hirtle/07hirtle.html

Copyright Renewal, Copyright Restoration, and the Difficulty of
Determining Copyright Status - Peter B. Hirtle, Cornell University

D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2008
Volume 14 Number 7/8

"It has long been assumed that most of the works published from 1923
to 1964 in the US are currently in the public domain. Both non-profit
and commercial digital libraries have dreamed of making this material
available. Most programs have recognized as well that the restoration
of US copyright in foreign works in 1996 has made it impossible for
them to offer to the public the full text of most foreign works. What
has been overlooked up to now is the difficulty that copyright
restoration has created for anyone trying to determine if a work
published in the United States is still protected by copyright. This
paper discusses the impact that copyright restoration of foreign works
has had on US copyright status investigations, and offers some new
steps that users must follow in order to investigate the copyright
status in the US of any work. It argues that copyright restoration has
made it almost impossible to determine with certainty whether a book
published in the United States after 1922 and before 1964 is in the
public domain. Digital libraries that wish to offer books from this
period do so at some risk."

The minefield is even murkier than we thought, it seems.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk