Re: Help settling a copyright question

On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Robert E. Jones, III <rjones[_at_]robjob.com> wrote:
>
> Facts: Author writes a few stories and sells them to pulp magazine in the
> 1930's. While there is no specific writing anywhere that the copyright's
> themselves were sold to the magazine, it was standard practice at the time
> (most checks from the magazines of the time bore a legend that endorsement
> assigned the rights to the magazine) and lets assume for the sake of the
> argument that there was an assignment of the copyrights to the
> magazines. The magazines published the stories with a general copyright
> notice for the magazine itself and nothing for the individual stories.

Another thing to consider is the status of publication. If the author did publish his article without registering it with the Copyright Office, his article is in the public domain and the renewal does not cover it. But, the law has a special meaning for "publication". Fishman's book that I recommended in other post explains what it is. If the author never published his work, the publisher owns the copyright in his work only if it registered that whole magazine with the Copyright Office.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com>
http://www.boycottcopyright.com

Number of days left until 1-1-2019 when all knowledge of 1923 in the land of the U.S.A. will be freed from their copyright owners' prisons: 5,605

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain. Received on Wed Aug 27 2003 - 19:22:34 GMT