[Froide]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Copyright cannot be "renewed"; it exists for a fixed time beyond the author's death, and then expires. One does not "obtain" a copyright - it automatically comes into being the instant the author sets pen to paper (or whatever the medium is). Likewise, there's no choice about whether or not a work enters the public domain - it just happens.

• True, copyright does come into being immediately upon a work's creation (as I stated).
• Also, instead of writing "obtained", it would have been more accurate to use the word "registered"; thank you for pointing out my lapse there.
• Regarding copyright renewal, in the USA and some other countries, it is/has been possible to renew some copyrights. As pwalker wrote:

Originally Posted by pwalker8

That all depends on where you live, and when the work was written. Copyright laws change all the time, or don't exist at all in some countries. In the US, there is a chart that shows when the copyright for a book expires, based on when it was written.

http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm

The US use to have a requirement for copyright registration and offered the ability to renew the initial 27 years copyright term for another 27 years. Just as a note, a book that was published before 1977 and did not include a copyright notice is in public domain in the US since they failed to follow the rules for copyright in the US.