Legal Research

Copyright Renewal Database

By David

Copyright law is a tangled web of rules. One of the most complicated is the determination of whether a works is in the public domain or still in copyright. The general rule of copyright of the author plus seventy years does not apply in certain circumstances to materials published before 1964. For more information on the issue,  see U.S. official  copyright website. [http://www.copyright.gov/gatt.html]   

Stanford University,  in an attempt to help alleviate some of this confusion, established the Copyright Renewal Database. [http://collections.stanford.edu/copyrightrenewals/bin/page?forward=home]  You can check renewal for materials received by the US Copyright Office between 1950 and 1992 for books published in the U.S. between 1923 and 1963. This database  is a great help for the materials not automatically renewed by statute from 1964 onward.  While the database has been available since 2006,  many people are unaware if its existence. Anyone interested in checking copyright status will appreciate this database. (Post-David)

Full post as published by Cocky Law Blawg on October 19, 2010 (boomark / email).