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

[Andrew Gray]

2009/1/12 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:

>> 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.
>
> We don't use the copyright not renewed clause stuff and commons'
> general support for Must be PD in the country of origin as well as the
> US means we mostly dodge the issue.

I'm not so sure that we don't use it - I can't cite chapter and verse,
but I've certainly seen it invoked here and there, usually with
good-faith due diligence to find renewals.

Sometimes it seems like what we need is a quasi-intelligent "PD-old"
template - you plug in the known variables, date created and date
published and author and country and so on, and it spits out "is
therefore public domain because X and Y, under provision Z". Be
horrific to maintain, though.

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