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   Space Catitude 🚀 (terryhancock@realsocial.life)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Nov-2024 00:26:09 JST Space Catitude 🚀

   Why would "The Stainless Steel Rat" by Harry Harrison be in the US Public Domain now? 🤔

   I mean, I'd be happy about it, but I don't understand it.

   Published 1961. UK Copyright. Harrison died in 2012.

   Did Harrison himself dedicate it to the PD or something?

   It'd be nice to have an explanation, as well as this claim.

   "Is believed..." -- by whom, exactly?

   https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/harry-harrison/the-stainless-steel-rat/text/uncopyright

   #Copyright #PublicDomain #Book

   • Embed this notice
         n8   Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦 (n8@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Nov-2024 00:26:07 JST     n8   Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦

     in reply to

     @TerryHancock I noticed that as well. AFAICT, from the Gutenberg site, they're saying that the original copyright registration was not renewed (and it had to be, for all the works copyrighted between 1929 and 1964, after which it became automatic or whatever).

     Searching for whether there was a renewal is generally a bear; only some of the records are OCRed & searchable. For the others, you have to step through images of handwritten renewal form scans. I did a ton of those for my PhD clearances.

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         n8   Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦 (n8@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Nov-2024 00:27:27 JST     n8   Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦

     in reply to

     @TerryHancock But at least the search site has digitized the names of the registrants. So you can narrow down your search space by author names & publisher names.

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         n8   Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦 (n8@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Nov-2024 19:08:42 JST     n8   Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦

     in reply to

     @TerryHancock Oh, believe me, I am solely limiting my comments there to "thinking out loud to try and interpret the wording they use", which says it was a renewal search. I'm not making any claim about their rationale being correct.

     As you say, it does not really make a whole lot of sense. The only other possible angle I could come up with was that they think a loophole arose because of the multiple publications (magazine first) but I still don't get what that would be exactly.

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     Space Catitude 🚀 (terryhancock@realsocial.life)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Nov-2024 19:08:44 JST Space Catitude 🚀

     in reply to

     •     n8   Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦

     @n8
     But the original copyright is listed as 1961, so the term would not have run out before 1978, when the law changed to conform to the Berne Convention.

     As far as I knew, anything under copyright in 1978 was automatically extended at that point.

     There WAS another way you could fall out of copyright in the 1960s -- which was to publish w/o notice. That's what happened to "Night of the Living Dead".

     Or it could've been explicitly disclaimed.

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         n8   Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦 (n8@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Nov-2024 19:10:05 JST     n8   Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦

     in reply to

     @TerryHancock (I had also just wanted to note from my own experience that the "search" process I assume they rely on is super buggy and inconclusive)