Resolving Copyright Issues

A general rule for determining whether a public domain book is in the public domain is to
check if it is published. If the book is published and the copyright date is 1922 or
before,then it is in the public domain.

But the real problem comes for works that are:

* Published after 1922 (1923 and onwards)
* Not published at all

For works published after 1922, there are several other criteria – yes, the copyright law
becomes a bit convoluted, but here’s the gist of it:

* If the work is published before 1964 without copyright renewal, it is in the public
domain.
* If the work is published before 1978 in the US without formal copyright notice, it
is in the public domain.

And if these two conditions are satisfied (work is copyrighted and was renewed), we now
enter the area of copyright law that has many content publishers protesting.

Essentially, the current copyright laws (based on the 1976 Copyright Act and the 1998
copyright extension) mean that any works published after 1922 (that have been
copyrighted and renewed) cannot enter the public domain until 2019!

The good news is, if this can be called good news, that 2019 onwards, the public domain
will start gaining a year’s worth of creative content every year. While this may seem like a
long time to wait (and like I’ve shown in this book, there’s no need to wait that long), that is
when the real power of the public domain will materialize (unfortunately, there are chances
that the copyright laws will become even more stringent).

If the work has not been published, there is a simple method to find out if it falls into the
public domain.

Unpublished works in the public domain begin with works created 120 years before the
current year of reckoning, and for authors who died no later than 70 years before the
present year. It simple terms, this means that if the current year is 2006 and you want to
use an unpublished work as public domain, it has to be created in 1886 or earlier, and the
author has to have died by 1936 or earlier.

If not, the work is not in the public domain.