Re: Wrong year in notice

On Mon, 23 Oct 1995, Glenn S. Tenney wrote:
>
> Last year I purchased reprint of a book. The reprint is copyrighted
> 1994 and is published in California (with a note that "The copyright
> of the material in this book reverts to XYZ Company"). Earlier this
> year I purchased (at a library sale) the original from which this book
> was reprinted. The original was printed and published in the UK with
> NO NOTICE and NO DATE. The only differences I was able to find between
> the two versions were that a picture of the author in the reprint is
> captioned with a date of 1956, and the title page on the reprint has
> more information including a note that the original book was printed
> in 1957.
>
> Since I found this new copyright notice to be a bit weird, I asked the
> publisher (it's a small company, so it really was the publisher) about
> this. He said that the original publisher asked him to put a copyright
> notice on his reprint.
>
> Ok... Now, this is clearly more than a year difference and the original
> had NO notice. Where do things stand in this situation? Was the
> original UK publication in the public domain? Is the new US reprint a
> potential copyright fraud? ????????

I would say that under the 1909 copyright law which would have been in effect at the time the 1956/7 work was published, failure to include a notice of copyright and date resulted in automatic forfeiture of copyright protection.

This is much the same as what happened with the first edition of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, which Ace books reprinted since there was no proper notice affixed to the original British printing. The later "official" Ballentine Books edition had to include a request from Tolkien about "showing courtesy" to living authors by buying only the editions approved by them, etc.

The 1956/7 text thus appears to be in the public domain, and no attempt to add a new copyright date to old material will suffice for its protection. You could call if fraud, but I suspect a court would merely disallow any infringement claims on the basis of it being an invalid copyright.

Maurice Robinson
<mrobinsn[_at_]mercury.interpath.com> Received on Tue Oct 24 1995 - 21:58:13 GMT