Book publishers

On 30 Jan 2007 at 16:29, Grant Stockly wrote: You'd have to go back a long way before the issue of "Copyright Renewal" had a bearing on this. Basically, anything having an in- force copyright in 1978 had the term extended to 75, then to 90 years automatically. That means that the only PD material we currently have (unless said material passed into the PD prior to 1978) was copyrighted prior to 1923. It's rare for property belonging to a defunct company to go unclaimed. Usually, someone purchases the intangibles as part of bankruptcy. Said intangibles often wind up in a box in a closet, but they exist nonetheless. But no, copyright as a rule does not revert to the author, unless this is so stated in the original contract wherein the author assigns ownership of the copyright to the publisher. Yes, it can be maddening to find out who owns what; the law is no help. If you publish something and the daughter of the guy with the box in the closet recognizes that you've published her material without permission, you're in trouble. Contrary to legend, there is no such concept in law as "abandonware". The Copyright Office has issued an opinion about archival preservation of old programs on obsolete hardware. Unfortunately, this doesn't cover much of what I see plastered around as abandonware, said material often would run just fine on a Windows XP command prompt, or, at worst, on DR-DOS or ConcurrentDOS or a number of other systems. The last I heard, the platform (x86) isn't obsolete yet. Cheers, Chuck