Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain

Authored by boingboing.net and submitted by syrupsticious

Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain

This January, we celebrated the Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain, as the onerous terms of the hateful Sonny Bono Copyright Act finally developed a leak, putting all works produced in 1923 into the public domain, with more to follow every year -- 1924 goes PD in 2020, and then 1925, etc.

But there's another source of public domain works: until the 1976 Copyright Act, US works were not copyrighted unless they were registered, and then they quickly became public domain unless that registration was renewed. The problem has been to figure out which of these works were in the public domain, because the US Copyright Office's records were not organized in a way that made it possible to easily cross-check a work with its registration and renewal.

For many years, the Internet Archive has hosted an archive of registration records, which were partially machine-readable.

Enter the New York Public Library, which employed a group of people to encode all these records in XML, making them amenable to automated data-mining.

Now, Leonard Richardson (previously) has done the magic data-mining work to affirmatively determine which of the 1924-63 books are in the public domain, which turns out to be 80% of those books; what's more, many of these books have already been scanned by the Hathi Trust (which uses a limitation in copyright to scan university library holdings for use by educational institutions, regardless of copyright status).

"Fun facts" are, sadly, often less than fun. But here's a genuinely fun fact: most books published in the US before 1964 are in the public domain! Back then, you had to send in a form to get a second 28-year copyright term, and most people didn't bother.

moration on August 4th, 2019 at 13:49 UTC »

There's this book in my specialty that gets pass around as a PDF because it's out of print. Everyone needs this book. I contacted the publisher to see if they would offer a digital version. They replied that they no longer owned the copyright, it went back to the authors. I emailed the authors. One replied that he didn't even know that happened and his co-author had passed away. The ownership is just lost. It's not old enough to have expired copyright. So we just keep sharing the PDF.

EdwardsNasty on August 4th, 2019 at 13:17 UTC »

The same goes for movies. I did some work for the media collections part of my colleges library checking for renewal dates on films. Disney was of course great about it but most others weren't.

RunDNA on August 4th, 2019 at 12:59 UTC »

This is big news. Most famous books will probably not be in that list, but I'm sure there will be a lot of scholarly books soon available for free online that were not available before.