
Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964 - BerislavLopac
https://www.crummy.com/2019/07/22/0
======
jandrese
I wish we would bring back manual renewals for copyright. I get that
publishers thought it was a hassle to have to do the work for stuff they had
not published in decades and had no intention of ever reprinting, but that's
kind of the point isn't it? Why is the government locking away works that the
original rightsholders no longer care about? The copyright system is supposed
to serve the common good, what common good is there from locking away works
simply because the original owner lost interest in them? Or worse, when nobody
knows who or where the original owner is.

~~~
pavon
I'm not a big fan of copyright renewals. There are two arguments I here in
favor of them. 1) It allows orphaned works to enter the public domain sooner.
2) For works that are renewed, it provides information on who the copyright
holder is and how they can be contacted.

On the first point, I think that renewal is a poor proxy for determining which
works are are orphaned or no longer have commercial value, instead just
showing which copyright holders have the most diligent book keeping. Large
number of published works will loose copyright protection just due to
oversight. A simple mistake shouldn't result in disproportionate consequences
(loss of decades of revenue). At the same time other works that are no longer
available on the market will be prevented from entering public domain by
companies that just renew everything.

Furthermore, historically, the USPTO has done a poor job of keeping (and
making accessible) records of which works were renewed, and which weren't.
Anyone who wants to use an orphaned work has needed to prove a negative, which
is difficult to do, so most assume that everything is still copyrighted to
avoid liability anyway.

Lastly, just because someone has registered a work (for renewal or otherwise)
is not proof that they hold copyright on that work. People have spent decades
trying to determine the rightful owner of a work so they can license it, even
when it was registered.

Instead, I think what we need is a process for the USPTO to grant third
parties permission to use a work when a good faith effort has been made to
determine and contact the copyright holder. In my view, this would involve
involve paying of statutory license fees to the USPTO who will hold them in
escrow. If the owner is eventually determined, they can claim the money, and
if no one claims it after some time it goes to fund the endowment for the
arts. This would allow the public access to orphaned and disputed works again,
and would encourage registration without the strong consequences for
forgetting.

I would actually take this a step further and declare that all works are
subject to statutory licensing for the second half of their copyright
duration, not just orphaned works, and the above process would just be a
fallback when the copyright holder can't be contacted. And of course, would
shorten the copyright duration as well.

~~~
WalterBright
I don't really see a big problem. You register a copyright within a year of
publication. The only one who can renew it is you or someone you designate,
which must have a paper trail. You supply contact info. If you cannot be
contacted by that contact info, copyright claims for your work are not
enforceable.

If you can't be bothered to do this, why should you be entitled to copyright
protection?

~~~
eridius
So if your house burns down and your "paper trail" turns to ash as a result,
you automatically lose copyright on all your publications?

~~~
WalterBright
The legal system has well-established means for dealing with the loss of
important papers like titles, deeds, contracts, wills, power of attorneys,
passports, birth certificates, receipts, etc.

For example, you can make a certified copy, and deposit the copy in a safe
deposit box or with your lawyer.

~~~
eridius
Right, but let's say you didn't do that because you weren't well-versed in the
legal system, so all you did was register your copyright, then transfer the
registration to your friend, who then stashed the documentation in a filing
cabinet.

Should you have to be an expert in the legal system to avoid losing your
intellectual property when your house burns down?

~~~
WalterBright
Like I said, there are established legal precedents for what to do if you burn
your papers.

Besides, the whole reason lawyers exist is so that people who aren't experts
in the legal system can hire one. You're not going to get very far in business
without discovering you need the services of a lawyer and a CPA. Often the
hard way.

I recall the actor Will Smith (Fresh Prince) who discovered the hard way that
he needed the services of a CPA.

~~~
eridius
You're not answering the question.

"Let's take a system that works today and impose an additional paper trail,
where you lose all your rights if you lose the paper trail."

"Won't that penalize people who don't have a lawyer and who lose their paper
trail?"

"Tough, people need to learn to use lawyers"

In fact, now that I right that out, that's an extremely antagonistic approach
to take and it punishes the least privileged people (e.g. the people who can't
afford lawyers), while doing absolutely nothing for the giant corporations who
have lawyers on retainer and will naturally have a process in place to retain
proper copies of the paper trail always.

------
tzs
Here is a very nice table listing pretty much every case under US copyright
law [1].

For books first published in the US, here is what is now in the public domain.

• Books published before 1924.

• Books published from 1924 through 1977 without a copyright notice.

• Books published from 1978 to early 1989 without a copyright notice and
without a subsequent registration within 5 years.

• Books published from 1924 through 1963 with copyright notice but whose
copyright was not renewed. (This is the case for the books the article is
talking about).

• Books prepared by an officer or employee of the US government as part of the
person's official duties.

[1]
[https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain](https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain)

------
blatherard
The important point in this article is that the NYPL just recently digitized
the relevant records, thereby making it possible to determine whether a
copyright was renewed. The old rule of thumb (anything after 1923 is
presumptively protected) was used because looking for the absence of a renewal
in a multi-decade span of printed records just wasn't feasible.

The linked post in the article is very detailed and has more background:
[https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-
history-19...](https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-
history-1923-1964)

------
AdmiralAsshat
I would be _very surprised_ if this were true. I volunteer with
standardebooks.org on getting books in the public domain transcribed,
proofread, and typeset for modern e-readers. There are a _swarm_ of books that
we would like to upload but can't, due to unclear copyright status on them.
This includes stuff that everyone and their mother has probably bought several
times already, including the works of HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, etc. For
most of these, we still follow the Mickey Mouse rule, and do not proceed until
we are absolutely sure they're safe.

Case in point, I've been thinking about transcribing The Worm Ouroboros[0] for
some time, as it should be in the public domain even by conservative
estimates, and yet I can't formally verify its copyright status, so I haven't
yet.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worm_Ouroboros](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worm_Ouroboros)

~~~
acabal
Alex from SE here. I wanted to transcribe _Worm_ a few years ago too. IIRC the
problem was that PG-AU had a post-1923 edition transcribed. The 1922 first
edition is extremely rare. The Newberry Research Library in Chicago has a copy
and I actually flipped through it once. But you can't check out those kinds of
rare books. They can scan books for you but at a fairly steep cost and I
didn't want to do that at the time.

Maybe the situation has changed since then! But I'd love to have that book in
our catalog.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Would I be able to take photos of the book pages if I'm in Chicago without
checking it out (on prem capture)? I am familiar with using a DSLR to non-
destructively capture book contents, and am willing to make the time to do so.
Looks like you even get 2 hours of parking for free!

~~~
acabal
Possibly, you should ask them. However most decent OCR requires a flat top
scanner or (in the case of rare books like this) a scanning device that holds
pages firmly and takes pictures from above. I imagine that bringing your DSLR
and doing it by hand for 200+ pages would be extremely tedious and error-
prone.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I have a portable cradle I can bring with me that will hold the camera above
while I flip pages. I emailed Newberry Library, and will report back when I
have more info.

~~~
Jun8
I have time to allocate to this next week and am willing to help. Was at
Newberry just last week for their monumental book sale.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I will be in touch when I hear back!

------
crazygringo
Wow... is this authoritative? If true, this is worthy of an article in major
news publications, no?

And if legally sound, then should we expect Google Books to make these 80% of
books fully available, as all books from 1923 and prior already are?

Also... how are we only figuring this out now?

~~~
btrettel
I've had good luck getting Google to mark books as public domain, at least if
they are government publications. Here's what I do: I click on the "Report an
issue" link at the bottom, select "I have a question or feedback about a
book", and fill out the form, selecting "I’d like to see the entire book, and
I believe the book is in the public domain" as the reason. Doesn't work every
time, but I'd guess it has worked over 90% of the time for me. Might work for
other reasons too. I don't know at the moment, but I'll give it a shot at the
next opportunity I have.

------
sehugg
Lots of TV shows before 1970 weren't renewed or had copyright notice errors,
making them PD -- many of them on archive.org:
[https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_TV_series_with_episode...](https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_TV_series_with_episodes_in_the_public_domain)

------
dwheeler
(Edit: I misread the original claim, my fault. So I'm fixing the text here.)

I think it's important to look at authoritative documents, especially since
copyright duration is absurdly complicated. You can learn more about copyright
duration in the US here: [https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-
duration.html](https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html)

Circular 15a "Duration of Copyright" from the US Copyright Office (
[https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf](https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf)
) says in heading "Automatic Renewal and Voluntary Registration" that:

* " _Mandatory Renewal_ Works originally copyrighted between January 1, 1950, and December 31, 1963. Copyrights in their first 28-year term on January 1, 1978, still had to be renewed to be protected for the second term. If a valid renewal registration was made at the proper time, the second term will last for 67 years. However, if renewal registration for these works was not made within the statutory time limits, a copyright originally secured between 1950 and 1963 expired on December 31 of its 28th year, and protection was lost permanently."

* " _Works originally copyrighted between January 1, 1964, and December 31, 1977_. Congress amended the copyright law on June 26, 1992, to automatically renew the copyright in these works and to make renewal registration for them optional. Their copyright term is still divided between a 28-year original term and a 67-year renewal term, but a renewal registration is not required to secure the renewal copyright. The renewal vests on behalf of the appropriate renewal claimant upon renewal registration or, if there is no renewal registration, on December 31 of the 28th year."

So there is a cutoff before 1964. However, it's not at all clear to me how
many times the copyright holders didn't renew their copyrights. I would be
unsurprised if the big publishers _did_ typically renew them. If a book was
published in 1950 and it _was_ renewed, then the copyright would continue
until 2045 (1950+28+67).

I've only listed 2 cases (just before & just after 1964), but there are
actually many more cases and it's all quite complicated.

I think copyright duration is grossly overlong, far in excess of what is
needed to get people to create works.

~~~
ealfert
I'm interpreting your quote as applying only to works first copyrighted after
1964. But, the poster is referring to works copyrighted before 1964.

------
tyingq
This affects earlier versions of the Alcoholics Anonymous "Big Book", and I'd
heard it was a sore point for them.

[http://silkworth.net/gsowatch/1939/uslaw.htm](http://silkworth.net/gsowatch/1939/uslaw.htm)

------
flycaliguy
Can anybody tell me if the same laws cover illustrations in old books that
cover the words?

~~~
jandrese
As far as I know the copyright terms for illustrations are the same as the
ones for the written word.

However, you could theoretically have a situation where the artist renewed the
copyright on the images but the author did not renew the copyright on the
words, or vice versa.

------
thepete2
Why is there no netflix for books? Google already scanned most of the world's
books. The only thing that would be scary is someone knowing what books I read
when and where. (my usual privacy concerns ...)

~~~
slg
There is. It is called the library. My local library has plenty of ebooks and
audio books that I can borrow through both their website and their partners'
websites like overdrive.com. And it doesn't even even cost you a monthly fee
because it is already paid for by your tax dollars whether you use it or not.

~~~
readams
Though there are often long lines to wait for many books, because the
licensing model is dumb.

------
edgarvaldes
I would love to have all the winners of the Hugo Awards(the first were given
in 1953)

------
acabal
This is really awesome and I wasn't aware of it! For a lot of the pulp sci fi
stuff on Project Gutenberg, it was just a handful of volunteers doing the
copyright research and I think it was a big bottleneck. I remember thinking of
getting involved in that research but it was far too complicated and time
consuming. Making it machine-readable is a huge step to opening up the public
domain!

------
shmerl
_> This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction
stories from the 50s and 60s._

Interesting. I was wondering how Project Gutenberg put Robert Sheckley's
stories on-line (and why only some and not all of them):
[https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2960](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2960)

It also highlights again, how crazy copyright term has become, and that it
needs a serious rollback to sane levels.

------
dfc
> This only represents 10% of the 80%, but it's the ten percent most likely to
> be interesting,

Does anyone have any insight into why the chosen 10% is the most likely to be
interesting?

------
mistrial9
.. for some value of "most"

~~~
kss238
The article says 80%

~~~
saalweachter
I would also keep mind Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crud", first
published 1957 in his book review column, interestingly enough).

Most books are crap. Interchangeable crap; maybe you'd enjoy some of them or
learn something, but you could pick at random from the interchangeable pile of
crap and be equally entertained and educated.

If you trawled that 80% of pre-1964 books, most of it would be crap, simply
because most books are crap, whether they were published in 1964, 2014, or
1864. And more of it would be crap, because if you are differentially renewing
copyrights on books in your catalogue, you are trying to renew the good stuff
and forget the crap.

That's not to say that good books didn't fall out of copyright, for a million
reasons, but if you have five books you like from before 1964, and you go
check the copyright status, don't be surprised if fewer than 4 are part of
that 80%.

