Copyright of posthumous works

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's not entirely odd, because the same 25 year copyright term applies to someone who applies a non-trivial layout to a public domain work; that particular "arrangement" of the work has a copyright term of 25 years from the date of publication; it's called a "typographical copyright".

It's a bit of a shame that dubious organisations like Gutenberg-DE (no relation to Project Gutenberg) use this somewhat unclear paragraph to try to smother the publication of any public domain text that they have "published" in their archive claiming that they have the copyright to that text. (Of course, this is not true. they only have the non-trivial layout copyright of this particular edition of the texts, seeing that they split the texts into chapters (even that copyright is doubtful))

[Jellby]

I think this is the relevant part of the Canadian copyright: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/fr/ShowDoc...06/en#codese:7

What I can make out of it is basically:

- 50 years after the first publication if published less than 50 years after the author's death.
- 5 years after the first publication otherwise.

[Elfwreck]

Has "published" been defined anywhere in copyright law?

It used to be an obvious term (it meant, basically, "printed on paper by a printing press"); that's no longer the case. If I run ten copies off my printer & give them to friends, is a work "published?" If it only exists in my hard drive and on my blog, is it "published?" (If the blog entry is locked so only I can read it, is that published?)

[pdurrant]

Not exactly. The text refers several times to "after the coming into force of this section" which I think happened in 1997 or 1998, and that's the relevant date for the start of the fifty years or the five years.

So unpublished works where the author died before (roughly) 1947 had a copyright that expired around 2002 or 2003, and unpublished works by authors who died after 1947, have a copyright that will expire around 2047.

This section in fact abolishes the "copyright for 50 years after publication" with a 50 year transition period, very similar to the UK law was done, except that the UK one came into force ten years earlier, and doesn't have the exception for authors who died more than 50 years before it came into force.

Originally Posted by Jellby

I think this is the relevant part of the Canadian copyright: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/fr/ShowDoc...06/en#codese:7

What I can make out of it is basically:

- 50 years after the first publication if published less than 50 years after the author's death.
- 5 years after the first publication otherwise.