Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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.
No, but it's simpler than it was.
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
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That's the problem with the US copyright laws. If we truly followed Berne, all you needed to know was when the Author died, and work from that. But we don't follow Berne, to protect Hollywood's sound pictures.
Actually I don't believe in Berne's Life + x. It should be life. If the Author croaks, the copyright ends. Or flat length x or life, whichever is longer...
We have the worst of all worlds in the US....
(I use the land analogy because it was unclaimed by anybody (just like an item is uncreated until somebody creates it), but to claim it, and put it into the economic stream, somebody had to do certain work to formalize the claim and set legal title. Then it could be bought or sold, assigned, traded, ect. Copyright holders want all the privileges of property without any of the cost and work attached. I think that's cheating. And it's bad for copyright itself.)