On 5/10/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
While there is an author and the "heirs and assigns" (a debtor for example) of an organization which may have legal claims there is miniscule chance that any of them would come forth. I know of no clause which excludes illegal publications from copyright protection. If the article has substantial historical importance it would fall under fair use.
Fred
My thought was that the copyright in the US might have elapsed due to publication without a copyright notice. But that's dependent on the status in the country of first publication, unless the work was published in the US within 30 days of that.
OTOH, it would be tempting to use the strategy of "just do it and see if anyone complains", especially as this work seems to be the type that would stand alone and not taint other parts of the corpus.
Anthony