Re: OT: Can a book published in 1908 still be under copyright?

On 17/07/06, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpjonsson@...> wrote:

> Yes, I found that Sweden now has a 70-year limit, but the
> book was published in Boston (I know there is at least one
> Boston in the U.K., but I think that's irrelevant here...)
> The question is which country's law applies: the country
> where the work was published, the country where reproduction
> is made/stored, or both.  As it happens the servers where
> my 'reproduction'(1) is going to be stored are located in
> the US.
Honestly, I don't know (I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on tv). I
do know that courts in some countries are happy to consider the
publication of internet things to have occurred in the country it was
downloaded into, not wherever the server is.

...

> BTW how do things stand when the whole work in question
> actually is a compilation of citations from earlier
> works, which themselves are actually citations from
> ancient sources?
In general, I'm pretty sure a particular compilation still has
copyright (think of tv broadcasts: the channel doesn't own the
copyright to the show, but they do own the copyright to the
broadcast).

I suppose before you go off and do this, the question you have to try
to guess is how much do you reproducing the work is worth to its
copyright holders, if any? If your reproduction is the last printing
from 1921, probably no-one will notice and you can take advantage of
US copyright law's early laxness. If it's from 2003 and they're still
running off more copies, I'd be inclined to be cautious ... even if
it's out of copyright and you can demonstrate that, you probably don't
want the legal challenge.

--
Tristan.

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