Timeline for What is the copyright status of a journal article written more than 70 years ago?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
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| May 11, 2021 at 17:09 | comment | added | jcaron | No idea what the rules were at that time (or retroactively), and even less how this would have survived the breakup of the empire, but nowadays even the article would likely fall under the "Works created in the course of employment" regime, or, even more likely, under the "Crown copyright" regime, since this was done by a civil servant in the course of his duties. | |
| May 10, 2021 at 22:06 | history | edited | Dale M♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 10, 2021 at 21:27 | comment | added | supercat | ...than tying the copyright of a work to the lifetime of authors without requiring that people publishing works include information sufficient to identify whether authors are still alive and, if not, when they died. | |
| May 10, 2021 at 21:25 | comment | added | supercat | @Kevin: The purpose of the notice requirement was to ensure that anyone who wanted to know if a work was in the public domain would be able to ascertain that. IMHO, the law should provided a means by which someone publishing a work with a defective notice could register their work in a special registry of such works, upon payment of a supplemental registration fee intended to minimize the amount of time people investigating the PD status of works would have to spend searching that registry for amended notices. Even with its defects, though, the law seems much saner... | |
| May 10, 2021 at 19:08 | comment | added | David Siegel | @Kevin There were reasons, some of them arguably good reasons, why US copyright law under the 1909 act was a tangle. It wasn';t really designed, it was bolted together bit by bit. but here on law.se we try to explain what the law is or was, not why it is the way it is or was, for the most part. | |
| May 10, 2021 at 18:56 | comment | added | Kevin | @Mast: Maybe so, but at least nowadays it doesn't involve goofy things like "the copyright notice was invalid" or "the US government seized the copyright after World War II and then lost it." | |
| May 10, 2021 at 17:16 | comment | added | Mast | @Kevin Modern copyright law is still confusing. | |
| May 10, 2021 at 16:46 | comment | added | Kevin | @DavidSiegel: I am increasingly convinced that pre-1978 US copyright law is all just an elaborate farce that lawyers invented to confuse people. | |
| May 10, 2021 at 15:59 | comment | added | David Siegel | Under US law (as opposed to the law of Ceylon or the UK), the text became public domain well before 2007. The Life+70 term applies, in US law, only to works created or first published after the effective date of the 1976 copyright act. so US copyright would have lapsed in 1996, if not before, if that matters now. (It might have lapsed sooner if the copyright was not renewed. although the URRA might have restored it until 1996) | |
| May 10, 2021 at 12:14 | vote | accept | Dakter | ||
| May 10, 2021 at 10:45 | history | edited | Dale M♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 10, 2021 at 10:42 | history | edited | user35069 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 10, 2021 at 10:32 | history | answered | Dale M♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |