Are old Canadian books now in public domain?

From: Lisa Petersen <lisap[_at_]ziplink.net>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 97 12:50:38 -0400

Hi everyone,

I've been lurking on this list for a couple weeks now, and this is my first posting.

As a volunteer Webmaster for a Canadian genealogy site, I'm trying to learn as much as I can about Canadian copyright laws. I downloaded the current Canadian Copyright Act from

    < http://canada.justice.gc.ca/STABLE/EN/Laws/Chap/C/C-42.html >

but, after reading it, I need to ask the experts on this list a few questions:

Does the life-of-the-author-plus-50-years protection apply to books published before that law was passed?

What is the term of copyright protection if the 'author' was a company?

The reason I'm asking is I want to extract some names from a (city) directory published by McAlpine Publishing Company in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1908, and make this a searchable database on my web site. No author is mentioned, and McAlpine's doesn't exist in Halifax anymore. Is 1908 old enough to be in public domain?

If not in public domain, could my intended use be considered fair use? I estimate that I would be extracting about 4% of the names, or about 2% of the contents of the directory. The names would be searchable on my web site, but not downloadable.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Lisa

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Lisa D. Petersen                Across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.

lisap[_at_]ziplink.net
http://www.ziplink.net/~hagen/
http://www.rootsweb.com/~nscolche/index.html Colchester Co. Nova Scotia

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Received on Wed Apr 30 1997 - 16:48:03 GMT