[bgalbrecht]

For what it's worth, I was looking at a science fiction novel written around 1952, which was at least partially serialized in an SF magazine (perhaps expanded for the novel), and was recently reprinted by Open Road Media. The various paper reprints for the novel over the last 6 decades claimed all sorts of copyright and copyright renewal dates, none of which I was unable to verify, and I tried sending an email asking the agent for the estate whether s/he could point me to the actual renewal records. I ended up getting a snippy reply from either the agent or someone at ORM (I forget which) who assured me that the heirs had paid the copyright office to confirm that there was a legitimate renewal even though I was never able to find one online. Since I was looking at this as a potential contribution to Project Gutenberg, I thanked them for their answer, assured them that I had no interest in pursuing something that could end up causing legal issues for PG, and pointed out a couple of potential places where the book was being treated as a copyright non-renewal, and dropped the matter.

Anyway, it's possible that either they were blowing me off, or that for one reason or another, the easily available renewal notifications were insufficient to identify whether copyright had lapsed. My personal suspicion is that works that are serialized in a magazine and then printed in novel form may end up with one or the other with copyright renewed, which makes the renewal search harder. It's my recollection that Project Gutenberg pulled at least one of their projects because the original story published in a magazine under a different name, was renewed, even though the novel was not explicitly renewed, but as a derivative work, the novel remained under copyright. Since I am not a copyright lawyer, I'll leave that sort of stuff to others, but I will have to say that based on my experiences, there may be more out there that's still in copyright even though the initial check of the copyright renewal databases don't show it.