What would you rather do:
look up the publication dates for 1001 books and the death dates of the author(s) for a large subset thereof?
I don't have to look up death dates. This is as much a complaint that it's different rather than it's messier.
look up just the death dates for < 1001 authors?
I found "Oklahoma, and other poems" in my library. It took 30 seconds to verify that it was in the public domain in the US. It took 20 minutes of searching by library staff to find out that he died in 1951. Mind you, any other library in the world would have taken longer or failed to come up with anything, as he used to live in this area and his death date was found in a book of local gravestones. Finding the publication date was worlds easier. You complain that a book you have doesn't have a publication date. In my experience, that's a rarity, and I still fail to find to understand why European publishers do that. If you don't have a publication date, how do you know that it's not a modern edition, and hence has typographical copyright in the EU, or even new editorial content? How do you prove that to the satisfaction of PG, who might have to prove it in court someday?
There are more books than authors. Just by confirming the death dates for CS Lewis, Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Anderson, Verdi, etc., gives me the public domain date for multiple books at a go.
It's not that simple. Just because Baudelaire died before 1935, doesn't mean the translator for Les Fleurs du Mal died before 1935, nor does it tell you who the translators were. You have to look up the translations of Les Fleurs du Mal, which will usually give you the publications dates, and then look up who the translators were and when they died, and they are much more unlikely to be well documented. If you go through that list, and mark The Flowers of Death as clearable because of when Baudelaire died, it's wrong; you've got to find out when it was translated into English and then when the translator died (much harder than the first.) Honestly, just confirming the death dates for most authors tells you that all of thier works are in the public domain in the US. The exception, works published after their death or still unpublished, are often still under copyright in life+x places, too. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm