Quote:
Originally Posted by Pulpmeister
Here's a curly one.
I have a digital edition, prepared by me, of Sir Malcolm Campbell's novel "Salute to the Gods" (1934).
Campbell died in 1948. However, so far as I can tell, the book with written in collaboration with an un-attributed ghost writer who was, it seems, James Wentworth Day. Wentworth Day (if indeed he was the ghost writer) died in 1983.
I assume that in this case the original copyright was always Campbell's, and that Wentworth-Day was acting as an employee of Campbell's for the novel.
Question: Is this book now in the public domain in life + 50 countries?
I know it is in Australia, assuming Campbell was sole copyright owner, because there was no back-dating when Australia went from Life +50 to Life + 70, ie, anything already in the public domain at the time of the change to life + 70 stayed in the public domain. This book was in the Aust Life + 50 PD at the time of the Aust copyright change.
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Marginal note:Anonymous and pseudonymous works of joint authorship
6.2 Where the identity of all the authors of a work of joint authorship is unknown, copyright in the work shall subsist for whichever of the following terms ends earlier:
(a) a term consisting of the remainder of the calendar year of the first publication of the work and a period of fifty years following the end of that calendar year, and
(b) a term consisting of the remainder of the calendar year of the making of the work and a period of seventy-five years following the end of that calendar year,
but where, during that term, the identity of one or more of the authors becomes commonly known, copyright shall subsist for the life of whichever of those authors dies last, the remainder of the calendar year in which that author dies, and a period of fifty years following the end of that calendar year.
1993, c. 44, s. 58.