Brexit Check what you need to do. Explore the topic Patents, trade marks, copyright and designs Copyright. Is this page useful? Maybe Yes this page is useful No this page is not useful. Thank you for your feedback. Report a problem with this page. What were you doing? What went wrong? Email address. Here's a quick, step-by-step version of how to search the copyright listings, using J.
Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye as an example. Start at the Copyright Catalog search page. You can then look up works by their title, name of author or copyright claimant, or other criteria. The title and name search options are based on prefixes, and there's also a relevance-ranked keyword search.
To look up the Catcher in the Rye, for instance, we could select the "Title" option, and then type in Catcher in the Rye in the search box. Note that the instructions tell us to omit the initial article, so we left off the "the".
When we hit return or select "Begin Search", we'll see the start of a list of results which had 63 items in it when I tried this. Or, we could select the "Name" option, and type in the author's name, last name first. We could, for instance, type in Salinger, J At this writing, that produced a list of 49 items. If we wanted to do a keyword search instead, we could select the keyword option and enter something like salinger catcher rye But note that this turns up many more items over when I tried it , including those that only match some of the keywords.
This can be useful for popping a possibly relevant result up to the top, particularly if you and the Copyright Office records don't agree on the exact forms of title and author names. But you probably won't be able to do an exhaustive scan of the results, and if you put in common words like "in" and "the", it may take a very long time for the search to complete.
A more precise form of keyword search is the "Command Keyword" option. Here you'll have to follow the special command keyword syntax, which includes putting things like AND or OR between search terms. If we select that option and try salinger AND catcher AND rye we get a much shorter results list 18 when I tried where only the items with all 3 keywords, spelled exactly as typed, will appear. The results list will come up in the form of a table, with columns that include "Full Title", "Copryight Number", and "Date" as well as some other columns in some other searches.
If the results list contains more than 25 items, they will be displayed 25 at a time, with "previous" and "next" links to go forward and backward in the list. To find renewals, look for Copyright Numbers starting with "RE". One quick way to find many such records is to resort the results by Date ascending. Since the renewal records tend to be indexed by the date of the of the initial registration, which tends to be prior to , the renewal records will usually appear before other records when you sort by ascending date.
If you did the search right, and you go through the results list, you should spot a row looking something like this: Catcher in the rye. By Jerome David Salinger. RE So it looks like it's been renewed. The "RE" registration numbers represent a renewal. If you see "TX", this represents an initial text copyright.
If I want to see more details about this registration, I select the link that's on the title. Variant title: The Catcher in the rye Names: Salinger, Jerome David, This tells me that the original copyright started June 11, , that it was renewed January 22, , and that the copyright holder at the time of renewal was J.
The original copyright registration "number" was "A". The current database pads the registration numbers with zeros. Also, the way they assign these numbers has changed over time; for earlier years, text copyright registrations started with A and renewals with R; in later years, such as the ones covered by this database, text copyrights started with TX and renewals with RE. The new renewal record number, without padding, is "RE". The "Basis of Claim" line means that all of the text except for two incidents is covered by this particular copyright.
Here's a summary of copyright durations in other countries, last I checked them: Please double-check terms for your country though, since as of this summary has not been updated for a few years : Short or nonexistent : A few countries have no copyright relations with the United States or with international copyright conventions. Other countries provide no copyright protection at all, or protection only for a short time period or for locally produced or registered works.
One country in this category was Afghanistan , last I checked. The Online Books Page will not list online books that are only in the public domain in such countries, unless they were originally published in those countries, or the copyright holder has given permission.
Note that in the US, works are not eligible for copyright protection unless they are published or created in a country that has copyright relations with the US. Most UCC members, however, now have longer terms, because they have signed on to the Berne Convention see below , or have joined organizations like the World Trade Organization that require eventually implementing Berne's longer copyright terms.
It is unclear, however, whether these changes will remain in effect after Iraq fully regains self-rule. It is unclear whether this country has copyright relations with the US, or with international copyright conventions. Therefore, some works by authors who died less than 50 years ago, but long enough ago that their copyrights had ended by the time of the country's term extension, might still be in the public domain.
Some may already have done so, though I do not yet have definite confirmation of any of the countries below. Among these countries are: Bahrain recent agip. I am told that copyrights that had already expired at that point were unaffected, but I don't yet have English-language confirmation on this point.
Kevin Hawkins of Michigan pointed me to a Russian site at copyright. There's also an English notice of the change at petosevic. Russia has also in the past granted extra time for authors who were active in World War II, or who were repressed and then rehabilitated.
I don't know if those extensions are included in the new law. Copyrights that had already expired at that point were unaffected. Life plus 70 years is also the standard duration of copyright in the United States for works first published after Some may have a transitional period that means that some works by authors who died less than 70 years ago may still be in the public domain.
If you want to use some of those works in one of those countries, you'll need to research national laws to see whether a country made the extension retroactive, of whether it just simply froze the public domain for a while. For example, most European Union countries made the extensions retroactive, rolling the public domain 20 years by bringing works back into copyright.
The public domain will start moving forward again in Australia at the end of This may also be the case for Russia see "authors living in " above. Israel had also done this previously, though long enough ago that its transitional phase has effectively ended at this writing. These longer terms may in the future serve as an excuse for extensions in other countries in the name of "harmonization".
In Guatemala , Honduras , and Samoa , for instance. I do not know if these laws cover older works or are just applied to copyrights current at the time the longer terms were adopted.
Again, I don't know to what extent, if at all, this law retrospectively applies to older books, or whether they just apply to books under copyright when the longer terms were adopted. Even longer : A few countries are now at or near the century point. In Cote d'Ivoire , copyrights tend to last for the lifetime of the author plus 99 years.
And in July , Mexico extended its copyrights to the lifetime of the author plus years! Again, I don't know to what extent, if at all, these laws retrospectively apply to older books, or whether they just apply to books under copyright when the longer terms were adopted.
In some countries outside the US, there is also a "law of the shorter term", which may expire copyrights for books written and published in other countries at the same time as they expire in their "home" country, if this is a shorter time period. In the cases of multiple authors, authors that are organizations rather than people, works not published until after the author's death, and works published outside the country, national laws vary.
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