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As I say, Kenny, it's not that the law has changed more often in the US than elsewhere, it's the fact that, up until 1964 (I think that's the right date) the US had a system of copyright registration and renewals, which (AFAIK) other countries did not. This means that you need to search copyright registers, and so on, to determine whether or not a particular work is still in copyright. In pretty much every other country, all you have to do is check when the author died. That's for books; there are of course of forms of copyright for such things as musical performances, and so on.
It really is a lot more complex to determine whether or not a book is in copyright in the US than it is elsewhere. Those of us who regularly upload books here can attest to that!
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