forwarded by Denny from ResearchBuzz
New Copyright-Related Database: Firms Out of Business (FOB)
The University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center and the Reading University Library have created Firms Out of
Business (FOB), an online database containing the names and addresses of
copyright holders or contact persons for out-of-business printing and
publishing firms, magazines, literary agencies and similar organizations
that have archives housed in libraries and archives in North America and
the United Kingdom.
FOB is a companion project to the Writers, Artists and Their Copyright
Holders (WATCH), an online database containing the names and addresses
of copyright holders or contact persons for authors and artists. The
WATCH file is accessible at
The objective of both projects is to provide information to scholars and
researchers about whom to contact for permission to publish text and
images that have copyright protection.
FOB entries are researched from standard reference books, university
library and archival catalogs and discussions with library colleagues
and other experts in the field. The entries are designed as factual
summaries, not as short company histories.
Two categories are represented in FOB. The first category includes firms
that went out of existence long ago and no longer hold publishing
rights. The other category comprises firms that have gone out of
business more recently, and directs inquirers who may have an interest
in rights that could belong to that firm or its successor.
Learn more about both databases here:
+ Direct to Firms Out of Business Database:
From Choice: This site provides one-stop shopping for copyright information complete with forms and processing instructions for obtaining copyright protection.
Hello all,
I am sharing this because it is an excellent resource for copyright questions.
**********
A new version of my copyright duration chart for archivists and librarians, "Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States," is now available at
http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/training/Hirtle_Public_Domain.htm
The chart began as an expanded version of Lolly Gasaway's copyright chart, but with the primary focus on unpublished works (though I included published as well). In this new version, the section on unpublished works has been updated to reflect copyright status as of 1 January 2004. A new section on the U.S. copyright status of works published outside of the U.S. has also been added. In order to facilitate printing, a PDF version of the file is available as well, and several new alternative copyright charts are listed in footnote 1.
I welcome corrections or suggestions for improvements.
Peter Hirtle
**********
--Kay [entered by SG]
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:
**************************************************
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.
************
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):
*************
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.
********************
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
roject 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 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 ***
[Poster's Note: This is a simple compilation of all 56 of the
half-yearly renewals from 1950 through 1977. Each of the renewals
books is shown with its own heading, and markup indicating page
numbers is retained.]
******************
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