Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
Actually, the public domain is any work copyrighted before January 1, 1923, and any work copyrighted after 1922 and before January 1, 1964 that did not have its copyright renewed or was originally published without a copyright notice, with the exception of works by foreign authors. Anything copyrighted between 1964 and 1977 has a copyright term of 95 years, and anything published after January 1, 1978 has a life+70 term, except works for hire, which basically have a 95 year copyright term. This is a summary of what Project Gutenberg uses to determine what is in the public domain.
A majority of work copyrighted between 1923 and 1963 did not have their copyright renewed and therefore are in the public domain in the US, but there is no definitive easily searchable database of copyright renewals, although the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database is pretty good. One problem is that there are issues with name changes and derivative works that can cause something that appears to be PD to actually be renewed. Popular authors who had their novels in print for most of the period between 1923 and 1963 usually renewed their novels, but their shorter work was often spottily renewed. |
Thanks for the additional, and corrected, information.