From: Paul Robinson <PAUL[_at_]TDR.COM>
Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring, MD USA
> friend noticed many books received during the last 6 months
> of year..copyright date of the following year..practice occuring
> more frequently now than in past...explanation? Is it legal?
> Does it have the effect of stretching the duration of copyright?
>
> I have noticed that...must be the work of an attorney far more clever
> than me. It is not a correct notice... (2) the year of first ,
> publication of the work...
>
> There are court decisions to the effect that a defective
> notice is NO notice. The statute is clear and speaks in mandatory
> terms. (Of course, notice is not mandatory to preserve
> copyrights, but correct notice helps to avoid a defense of
> innocent infringment).
Are you forgetting Berne? Notices aren't required. The only reason a notice is required is if you need protection in a UCC-Only country. Lack of a notice gives grounds to argue innocent infringement, but even a _technically defective_ notice would be enough to alert someone that the party in question does claim a copyright in the work, and would probably be grounds for a court to reject innocent infringer claims, especially if the work is from a major commercial book company, and more so if the work is registered.
Also, you seem to forget that the copyright law permits a work to have a notice "post dated" by up to one year and be valid. I remember reading that once. It doesn't say that directly, but it does say that a notice which is not more than one year "early" is acceptable.
To answer the first person's comments, before the 1978 revisions, publication with a post dated notice was the same as no notice. (There was a court case invoving a publisher in Spain, I believe - which was then on Berne - that released a book with a post-dated notice. It voided copyright in the U.S. but did not affect its Berne rights.)
A post dated notice on a corporate work might conceivably make people think it's protected for longer, but since registration used to be required, the registration would tell when publication occurred.
Actually, a year notice is irrelevant except for pseudononymous and for-hire works. A work where the author is an individual is protected for life plus 50, therefore the publication year is irrelevant, since the copyright expires when the author has been dead for 50 years, irregardless of whether the work was published 20 years before he died or 49 years after, the protection ends at life plus 50, and the date of publication is irrelevant.
So a post-dated (or pre-dated) year notice wouldn't matter in the case of the copyright owner being an individual and post dating would not grant additional time.
--- Paul Robinson - Paul[_at_]TDR.COM Reports on Security Problems: To Subscribe write PROBLEMS-REQUEST[_at_]TDR.COM Voted "Largest Polluter of the (IETF) list" by Randy Bush <randy[_at_]psg.com> ----- The following Automatic Fortune Cookie was selected only for this message: He's so evil he lowers the moral standing at a Jeffrey Dahmer fan club.Received on Thu Nov 03 1994 - 16:20:26 GMT
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