The Stanford database that others have mentioned is a better place to start than the Rutgers one. It incorporates the Copyright Office's online records and the data in it, derived from the PG files, has had more consistency checks, etc than the Rutgers version. The Stanford folks started with the Rutgers files, but improved them substantially. But checking it is not sufficient in itself. As others have said, the nationality of the author must be checked. Also, please note that I usually leave these clearances for Greg to approve and he usually only gets to them about once a month. So you'll probably have a much longer wait than usual for approval. Juliet On 8/11/2010 5:41 PM, Al Haines wrote:
James, as other responders have said, Rule6 submissions are do-able, but can be painful. I've successfully done 15-20 of them over the last few years, all for books published from 1923 up to the late 1930's, most recently PG#33381, 33382, and 33383.
I use this link at Rutgers to do a quick check:
http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~lesk/copyrenew.html
If some combination of the book's title words and author turn up, the book was renewed and a Rule6 submission isn't possible.
If this check shows that the book's copyright apparently wasn't renewed, then I start work on the Rule6 submission form mentioned in David Price's response. I start with #4 (author nationality), since Rule6 applies (as I understand it) only to U.S. published books by U.S. authors, so if the author isn't/wasn't American, Rule6 fails. There's no point in doing all the date/renewal research only to find out the author was, for example, British.
To actually check renewals, go to http://www.ibiblio.org/ccer/ or http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/. You'll have to check all four years specified in the Rule6 submission form (copyright+26 to +29), twice for each of those years (Jan-June, July-Dec), checking all the keywords in the book's title, the publisher's name, and the author's name. The whole thing involves a LOT of checks. Assuming a two-name author, a one-name publisher, and a two-word title, done twice each for the four years, it works out to 40 separate checks (5x2x4=40).
This used to be fairly simple, if tedious, when the above sites had links to the individual renewal record page scans. Somewhere along the line, this changed to point to Google, which has the page scans and PDF compilations of them. Problem is, Google seems to have screwed up some of the PDF files in that some scansets are misordered, others' pages have been cropped. The actual scans are OK, but you can't link directly to a specific page, as Ibiblio/Onlinebooks used to do.
If the PDF file for a given year is OK, it doesn't take long to find the page with the desired range of records, but if the PDF file is bad, you have to (very painfully and slowly) scroll up/down to find the page scan with the desired range of records.
A simpler alternative, if you can prove the author (of whatever nationality) has been dead more than 50 years, might be to check if the book is of interest to Project Gutenberg Canada (http://www.gutenberg.ca/). For more info on Canadian copyright law (which has wrinkles of its own), Google the words "canadian copyright law".
I hope this helps, and good luck!
Al
-----Original Message----- From: gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org [mailto:gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org] On Behalf Of James Simmons Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2010 7:18 AM To: Gutenberg Volunteers Subject: [gutvol-d] Rule 6 Copyright Clearance requirements
I just had a couple of TP&V's rejected because the books were published after 1922 and I didn't follow the Rule 6 procedures. I have read every word on the PG website related to Rule 6 and I'll be damned if I can figure out just what those procedures are. The Rule
6
HOWTO is blank and has been for months.
Specifically I have several books that the Stanford copyright
renewal
database does not show being renewed. In several cases books by the same author *are* shown as being renewed, so I would have assumed
that
if the books in question had been renewed there would be a record of it. I pointed this out when I submitted the TP&V's.
Is it even possible to get a Rule 6 clearance without a letter from the author or a professional search by the LOC?
James Simmons _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d
_______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d