On Sun, 17 Sep 2006, Norm Wolcott wrote:
Is this 5 year provision still in force? To me this would seem to imply that English language books published abroad that have not been published in the US within 5 years would have no US copyright. In particular english language books never published in the US would have no copyright. Am I obviously missing something? Obviously the US Code not the copyright Act is probably the controlling factor. The clause may have been revoked.
No, the interim provision is not in force any more. The current law for new copyrights does not require a US registration to recognize foreign copyrights. The US is a Berne signatory now and wasn't during the life of the 1909 law. It did work that way, where if you didn't file within 5 years in the US you got no protection. That changed sometime in the 70's and the 1996 Uragray round made it retroactive. Lots of things came back under copyright in the US in 1996. That's why rule 6 only applies for US authors and for books first published in the US. It gets really hairy if both of those aren't true. IANAL and this isn't advise, but I've been beating my head against it for over a year now, and that's my understanding. If anyone has a better understanding pipe up. -- Greg Weeks http://durendal.org:8080/greg/