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For those of you outside the US, the US copyright law was once a fixed period with the right to renew that copyright. Books published prior to 1923 have passed through all available copyright protections in the US. Those published after that may or may not still be protected. Many copyrights were held by companies that did for one reason or another ceased to exist (merger, acquired, folded, etc) and a lot of these copyrights were not renewed. This is what happened to a lot of the SciFi that has entered the PD and is posted on PG. Those works that fell out of copyright prior to the new law could not be recopyrighted or taken from the public domain.
PG spends a lot of time and effort researching the copyright status of post 1923 books that are posted on their site. If you read their notices they say that their research did not show any evidence of the copyright still being in force. I am sure that if they somehow missed a renewal and it was proven to them that they would remove the book. A lot of what they publish from the post 1923 era is material that has been out-of-print since the first publication.
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