Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
From the document you linked to (bold added):
"The 1976 Copyright Act carried over the system in the 1909 Copyright Act for computing copyright duration for works protected by federal statute before January 1, 1978, with one major change: the length of the renewal term was increased to 47 years. The 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act increased the renewal term another 20 years to 67 years."
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I don't think that it's retroactive. The length of time of the renewal, which occurs in the final year of the original copyright, is whatever the length of time was when the renewal occurs. So the renewal term for a work that was originally copyrighted in 1968 and renewed in 1995 was 47 years, the renewal term for a work copyrighted in 1971 and renewed in 1998 was 67 years (assuming my math is correct). That is my understanding of how it works. There was a matrix of how long copyrights lasted and it was fairly complex. Wish I could find it again, because it was fairly complex with a lot of if's.