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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Dennis, that has always confused me. According to one part of the copyright law, you can't claim a copyright extension by refiling a new copyright unless the material has had significant changes, but authors copyright their books that were in original magazines. If there were no changes, how can the copyright by the author hold up. Can you explain? I'm seriously curious....
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I'm not fully conversant with the rules myself.
In some cases, back in the really old days, I believe magazines bought all rights, which would be one matter. In other cases, you had things like stories in a connected world which were published as novelettes in a magazine, and then stuck together to make a book. So you get E. E. Smith's _Triplanetary_, the first of the Lensman series, available from PG, because that version is from the Amazing Stories serialized version, but the other Lensman books aren't PD. Or two different versions of some H. Beam Piper stuff, one from a magazine publication, and one from a book edition.
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(And the US is still not a true follower of Berne, because of all those post 1923, extension exceptions... It's not just life + 50 or 70....)
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No, but it's simpler than it was.
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I believe there should be a formal copyright process and repository, and it should not be free. Copyright is, above all, about economic value. Even in the Old West of America, the people who got to keep the land paid to have it surveyed, and registered. By not requiring registration, you get all the "orphan works" problems we are wrestling with now....
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You get orphan works problems
with registration.
One contact locally is an Orthodox Jew. He had a treasured copy of a rare work on Jewish mysticism, that had been passed around the Jewish community in Xerox copies because the original book was nearly impossible to find. He wanted to publish a new edition, but the author was dead and the publishing house that had issued it no longer existed. It was possible the author had an heir that technically owned the rights, but go ahead,
find him/her to get permission.
Most of the "orphan works" problems I can think of date from the period before the US joined the Berne convention, but no matter. They're orphaned because it's not clear who owns the rights. "Okay, Joe Schmoe wrote this, but it was published by Puddleglum Press, who normally bought all rights, so Joe's heirs don't have an interest, but Puddlegum went belly up many years ago, and we can't find any records to clarify whether they renewed the copyright, or what happened to the rights when they croaked..."
And in any case, I
don't want to see a return to the days when you had to file with a ay a fee to the Library of Congress simply to
have a copyright. The analogy with settlers on land doesn't hold up, as land has physical existence and
can be surveyed and deeded. Intellectual property covered by copyright is a different matter.
And finally, while I'd love to see a rights repository where you could check on the status of a work, it really needs to international.
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Dennis