copyright status bet 1923-1963

[Michael Hanel]

Can anyone provide any definitive information whether a work from 1926 is in public domain or not? I'm looking at Aeschylus' works which were published in 1926. According to copyright law works published between 1923 and 1963 would be in the public domain if they were not renewed. So far it seems there are a few ways to check whether a work was renewed or not, but I couldn't find anything that I would consider 99% reliable. Anyone able to provide any further info?

My assumption would be that this particular work would not have been renewed since there are at least two newer versions of it, the Page edition being the most recent. My goal has been to provide the best public domain texts possible of classical Greek texts and I would hope to offer Aeschylus' works in the near future, but I want to proceed legally.

[Glenn Weaver]

Hi Michael,

Copyright status is very difficult to nail down. Contacting the original copyright holder is the best bet, but you can't guarantee that they will know, that they will tell you if it is in public domain, or that they will even respond to your request. You can contact the U.S. Copyright office, but it will cost you money to have them check for you.

International copyrights are sometimes different. Sometimes what is in public domain in the U.S. may not be in the public domain in the U.K., for example.

Sorry, but there are no shortcuts. I wish there was.

Glenn

[ddyke]

Sometimes it is hard to track down the holder of the copyright if there has been one or more deaths.

Dan

[jdarlack]

Cornell University has a great chart that details when both domestic and foreign works reach public domain. See here!

[Michael Hanel]

Cornell University has a great chart that details when both domestic and foreign works reach public domain. See here!

Actually Jim it was one of the links in my original post, so I heartily agree with you Poor guy, you must be working too hard

[jdarlack]

Actually Jim it was one of the links in my original post, so I heartily agree with you Poor guy, you must be working too hard

LOL! On a more serious note, I've noticed that in the forums the default rendering of a hyperlink is simply an underline (without any change of the link's color to the "standard" blue). I "honestly" think I skipped over the links in Michael's post, simply because I'm used to picking out blue links, or at least links of a different color from the text's body. I wonder if it would be worth turning on the "blue" for hyperlinks by default in the forum? (To make my links look "standard," I have to manually change the color and add an underline.) I know that the links turn "red" when folks hover over them with their mouse, but most folks don't methodically hover over everything on the screen, so they have no way of quickly distinguishing a simple underlined word and a hyperlink. See here.

[ddyke]

What confuses me in all of this is the line "Published without a copyright notice." Here is where it gets tricky to me. In the Loeb library they don't give the usual magic formula with copyright, date, all rights reserved, etc. but just a date of printing. Is this copyright notice?

Dan