On Tue, 1 Nov 1994 ebarnas[_at_]ravenpress.com wrote:
>author of the work. So if I write a book and assign the copyright to a publisher, although the publisher is a corporation and the owner of the copyright, the duration of the copyright is still my life plus 50 years.
> Duration of copyright is still tied to a set number of years where the
> copyright owner is a corporation, a most publishers are.
Actually, it doesn't depend on the copyright owner, but rather on the
The exception you're thinking of is a work for hire, where the corporation is considered the author of the work. This will only be the case where the person creating the work is an employee of the corporation, or where the corporation is commissioning one of a fairly narrow list of types of works, and there's an agreement between the corporation and the contractor-author that this is to be considered a work for hire.
I'm sure there are many publishers whose works are true works for hire (I imagine most map publishers, for example), but I suspect that the majority of publishers are not the authors of the works they publish.
In the case of a work for hire, copyright lasts for 100 years from creation or 75 years from first publication, whichever comes first. It is in this last case that the date of first publication is relevant to determine expiration of copyright.
Of course, this is all _current_ law. There are a lot of works that were created and published under prior law (pre-1978), whose copyright is still determined by date of first publication.
-- Terry Carroll Santa Clara, CA carrollt[_at_]netcom.comReceived on Wed Nov 02 1994 - 01:56:09 GMT
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