Project Gutenberg has now put US copyright RENEWAL records from 1950-1977 online. There are 56 files, each representing one six-month period, which may be opened and searched individually, or one gigantic file containing all 56 six-montly files sequentally, which will take some time to download. See the extended entry for more detail. The big file is at
http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/8/0/11800
for the smaller files, change the last number in the URL; thus the two six-monthly files for 1950 end in 11801 and 11802, and so on.
(this is a lightly edited version of a posting I made to a newsgroup / DLien)
(also, don't forget that copyright records from 1978 to date--new entries and rights transfers, as well as renewals, can be searched at
http://www.copyright.gov/records/
or at
http://www.copyright.gov/records/#locis ) - DLien
text follows:
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In the past I've made mention here of (US) CATALOG OF COPYRIGHT ENTRIES texts for 1950 on (involving renewals of US copyrights from 1922 on) as linked from
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/cce/
even though they'd not gotten many years into the project.
For 1950, 1951, and 1952, page images are available:
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/cce/1950r.html
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/cce/1951r.html
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/cce/1952r.html
And someone else has provided more readable (and searchable) text versions for most of these, and a few more years.
http://www.kingkong.demon.co.uk/ccer/ccer.htm
The pages images cover copyright renewals of (almost) all sorts--not only books, but also periodicals and individual periodical contributions.
The text version claims to be "complete" for books for 1923 through 1927, and "partial" for 1928; complete for periodicals for 1923 and 1924 and partial for 1925; complete for invididual contributions for 1923, 1924, and 1927, and partial for same for 1925, 1926, and 1928.
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However, the purpose of this note is to update another source. I think I pointed out a year or two ago that Project Gutenberg was also producing CCE volume files for web posting. When I checked my bookmarks on the few they had done earlier today, I found that the URLs had changed and that, most interesting, they've now produced a flat text file including renewals from 1950 through 1977 (previously they'd only managed four or five years):
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All Project Gutenberg etexts of U. S. Copyright Renewals have been reposted, in their six-monthly volumes, as etext numbers 11801 through 11856 inclusive.
A combined, complete edition of all Copyright Renewals has been posted as etext number 11800, and can be found at
http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/8/0/11800
This placeholder notice was posted 31 March, 2004, and will be removed after some time.
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The conglomerated file took several minutes to download on my (fast) machine, so users beware--
http://gutenberg.net/1/1/8/0/11800/11800-8.txt
Project Gutenberg's Copyright Renewals 1950 - 1977, by US Copyright Office
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.net
Title: U.S. Copyright Renewals 1950 - 1977
Author: US Copyright Office
Release Date: March 30, 2004 [EBook #11800]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COPYRIGHT RENEWALS 1950 - 1977 ***
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Note that this is *not* a one-alphabet reordering, but the 56 original six-monthly files, one after another. The advantage of having all in one, of course, is to enable you to search for material using your browser's "find" command once instead of 56 separate times.
Unfortunately, I'm by no means sure we can trust it. I checked some genre periodicals that I was virtually certain would have been renewed, such as AMAZING; ASTOUNDING; BLACK MASK; SHADOW; WEIRD TALES and did *not* find renewal records for the periodicals (though I found many instances of renewals by the author/heirs for individual contributions to those periodicals). So it looks as though this file contains essentially book renewals and contribution renewals only -- except that my eye did catch some other periodical renewals by accident: AINSLEE'S, for instance, COUNTRY GENTLEMAN; LADIES HOME JOURNAL; etc., so now I don't know what to think about the periodical aspect.
Denny Lien / Wilson IRIS (posted by Amy)
Posted by bgi at July 21, 2004 03:43 PM | Email This Entry