subscribe to this page
U.S. copyright renewal records available for download
Monday, June 23, 2008 at 9:45 AM
If I handed you a book and asked whether it was in copyright or in the public domain, you'd probably turn to the copyright page first. Unfortunately, a copyright page can't answer that question definitively -- at best, it could tell you when the book in your hands was published, and who owned the rights to it at that time. Ownership can change, though: rights revert back to authors, and after enough time has passed, the book enters into the public domain, letting people copy and adapt it as they wish.
So how much time is "enough"? It varies, often depending on the country, on when the book was published, and whether the author is living. For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable.
How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly typed in every word.
Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.
There are undoubtedly errors in these records, but we believe this is the best and most comprehensive set of renewal records available today. These records are free and in the public domain, and we hope you're able to use them to determine the copyright status of books that interest you.
At Google, we're committed to making as many books available online to users as possible while respecting copyright, and this is one example of that commitment. Watch this space for more to come.
Book pages 223 through 228.
Copyrights for Laurel and Hardy films are owned by Hal Roach Studios for which Michael Agee is the chairman. Despite directly benefiting from the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), Agee opposes the legislation. Even though Roach sells thousands of DVDs and video cassettes of these films, few of what they own still has any commercial value. The works sit in a vault, and even though what doesn't presently have value could be deemed valuable by the owners of the vault, the commercial benefits from the works must surpass the costs of making the work available for distribution in order for this to happen.
We cannot know the benefits described above, but we can know the costs. Today, film restoration, which used to cost thousands of dollars, can be done for hundreds. This leaves most costs to the hiring of lawyers, who are presently necessary in order to find and secure rights from the many copyright owners of a film. Thus the process of restoration for the preservation of film is time consuming and costly, and unfortunately it can be argued that the benefits do not outweigh the costs. Therefore we wait until the copyrights expire to restore them, but because these old films were produced on nitrate-based stock, by the time the term expires, the stock will have dissolved and there will be nothing left to restore.
This death of old film and creative works is the death of future works. Even is someone chooses to wait until the end of a copyright term to create a derivative work, the original work from which the person wishes to derive will no longer physically exist, making the creation of the derivative work quite difficult. Today we have digital copies of work with a much longer lifespan; however, if big media companies continue to push for term extensions such as the CTEA, works may never pass into the public domain and new works with potentially high commercial value as well as creativity will never be produced.
Also referred to as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act or disapprovingly as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by twenty years. Previously, copyright lasted the life of the author plus fifty years, or seventy-five years for a work of corporate authorship; this act extended copyright to the life of the author plus seventy years and ninety-five years, respectively. Basically, this act halted the advancement of the public domain.
Supported by big media companies like Disney (ironically, considering many of Disney's famous and timeless creations are borrowed ideas) and by self-concerned artists' widows like Mary Bono, the proposal for this legislation hit the floor with a bang. At one point during debate Bono stated that Congress should consider the MPAA's Jack Valenti's proposal of a copyright term of "forever less one day." After supporting arguments such as the increasing length of human life expectancy and the negative global effects on the entertainment industry of differences between American and European copyright terms, Congress passed the legislation with a 105 to 298 vote.
However, as opponents of the act argue, this act is unconstitutional because such an act is not "necessary and proper" in accomplishing the Constitution's stated purpose of "promot[ing] the progress of science and the useful arts." In addition, a strong case can be made that under perpetual copyright, some works would not be created that would have been under limited-time copyright. This is due to the fact that few creators of distantly derivatives works have the money and resources necessary to seek out the original work's copyright owner or to purchase a license, and often enough original owners might even refuse a license. Thus it is made clear that a rich and constantly replenished public domain is necessary for the continuation of artistic creation.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998 under the Clinton administration, was an attempt by congress to address new and emerging technological advances that threatened copyrighted material. Congress, deciding that the Nation's copyright laws were becoming antiquated and often usless, decided to advance a project to move these areas of legislation into the digital age. The DMCA put a ban on any implement (both physical instrument and software) whose intended function was the circumvention of copyright safeguards. This legislation targeted devices such as VCRs, which were required to include copy prevention built-in, but focused even more on burgeoning internet technology such as peer-to-peer clients. DMCA Title II, for example, provides safe harbor to Internet Service Providers that comply and adhere to copyright guidelines, and agree to block the access of users who are shown to be committing copyright infringement.
As much as this legislation tries to protect works from being copyrighted in this new technological age, it is simultaneously hurting independent creators from distributing their content through one of the few networks they have left. Because copyright law has grown so much over the century, artists without fiscal resources to clear the ever expanding copyrights would often simply not create at all, or choose not to distribute their creations for fear of consequential lawsuits. But with the invention of the internet, authors and artists suddenly have a new way to get their work out to the public. The internet is a world-wide market where anyone can post and make available virtually anything. However, the DMCA is limiting the potential use of this valuable and incredible resource by allowing and facilitating the searching and taking down of every small bit of copyright infringement. If things continue in this direction, creativity and innovation will have no market or means of distribution.
Once a work has entered the public domain, the original owner no longer has rights over it. This clause of copyright law has proven challenging as past copyright holders have attempted to reclaim their rights when it becomes suddenly convenient. This is the subject of the U.S. Supreme Court case Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
In 1948, Fox obtained rights to create a television series called Crusade in Europe based on a book written by Eisenhower and published by Doubleday. Doubleday renewed the copyright to the book in 1975; however, Fox chose not to renew their copyright on the series, which thus entered public domain in 1977. Dastar then took the series in 1995, edited and manipulated them, and repackaged them. They sold the new videos and credited Dastar employees as producers and not the original book or TV series.
Fox sued in 1998, attesting that Dastar had infringed on copyright and had "passed off" the work as their own. The district court found for Fox and awarded it double Dalstar's profits. Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision of the district court and another appeals court. In an 8-0 ruling, the court reasoned that once a work passes into the public domain, anyone in the public may do anything he or she wishes with it and does not have to attribute the author.
This court ruling helps promote creativity somewhat by assuring artists that anything in the public domain is fair game for their use in future works. However, there is still the fear that someone might try to claim rights, and often the potential battle isn't worth it. In addition, copyrights today, thanks to extensions, are so long that producers and publishers don't need to renew copyrights because they last well over the death of the author. Once again, the copyright monster scares small companies from creating for fear of infringement.
In the world of copyright law, there is currently a major debate over whether or not the already granted extensions of copyrights are beneficial or detrimental to the creative process, and whether or not these extensions should continue to be made. Up to this point, lawyers have successfully defended copyright extensions as being "good for the arts" by preventing "dilutions" of artists' works. However, as Lawrence Lessig comments in the article, "[The media companies] have used their power to protect themselves against innovation, which is exactly what the copyright was originally set up to guard against."
If it weren't for the ability to borrow and manipulate, half of Disney's iconic figures that we as a society hold so close to our hearts, such as Mickey Mouse and Snow White, would never have existed. And the direction in which copyright is presently going could prevent the creation of future icons. As Lessig makes point of, artists should be compensated for their works, but such ridiculously long extensions of copyright are only hurting society. If these extensions had existed a hundred years ago, Disney would never have been able to create Steamboat Willie from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr., nor would we ever have been able to enjoy Snow White or Cinderella, both clearly borrowed from the stories and tales of the Borthers Grimm.
This article clearly relates to the argument that copyright can and is hurting creativity. As it was originally intended, copyright was enacted to protect the creative process, not diminish it. However, its direction today is butchering creativity. Just because something is borrowed from an older work to create a new one doesn't mean that the creator of the new work doesn't have any original ideas of his own incorporated into the work. Thus, Lessig and colleague Eric Eldred are fighting to take back the public domain and reconvert it into a lawyer-free zone. In Lessig's words, he's trying to "Free Mickey."
In this article, David G. Post comments on Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and his statements concerning copyright and creativity. As is pointed out, copyright's original intention was to safeguard creativity by assuring creators that their works would be protected from replication. It made a creator the owner of his or her creation and gave him or her complete control over what would be done with the work. The assurance that this copyright provides in a way gives authors an incentive to create.
With regards to the other argument concerning creativity and copyright, the one in which it is claimed that copyright limits creativity, Lessig states that copyright law has, until now, for the most part "steer[ed] a middle course" and remained balanced by protecting the rights of today's creators and simultaneously limiting these rights so that the next generation is free to borrow what they want from the previous. However, Post tells of what is currently happening and states that copyright has "swollen to gargantuan proportions" and no longer resembles, not even closely, what it originally was.
Lessig's contention for why copyright is killing creativity is that power is now concentrated in the few hands of the big media companies. Post does not agree with this for lack of evidence and denies Lessig's substantiation of a few anecdotes. However, with reference to film, this claim is not far from true. Film production companies are now few in number, and even those that we believe are small indie companies are in fact owned by Fox 20th Century, Miramax, Paramount, or MGM. Even those movies that we believe are far from being under the influence of big media are in reality being dictated by the same big names and the same big money that your average major Hollywood production is.
In the end, whether Post agrees with this claim of Lessig's or not, he praises the author's attempts and goes as far as to say that one beginning to study copyright could "do much worse than to start with Lessig's book."
-Help liberate over 56,000 digital USGS maps. Donate or purchase maps on DVD to meet the ransom demand. Once the $1600 ransom is met, all maps will be handed over to the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive will make every map available for free download forever!