Are you being serious? The US law is anything but messy. Instead of trying to find out exactly when the author died (and that can be harder than it sounds for obscure authors) or even more fun, all the editors, illustrators and contributors to a composite work, find out when they ALL died, take the one that died last .... With the US law, you just take the printed publication date and add 95 years. It is a ridiculously long copyright term, true, but it is very easy to determine. Josh ----- Original Message ----- From: "Wallace J.McLean" <ag737@freenet.carleton.ca>

I'm on it, but can only do it considering life+50 and life+70. I don't have the time to apply the messy US law. I'll post up my results when they're ready.

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From Steve Herber <herber@thing.com> Date Mon, 10 Jan 2005 12:17:24 -0800 (PST) To gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org Subject [gutvol-d] Top 1000 collection list and suggestion

An annotated version of this list with two extra pieces of data would make an interesting Project Gutenberg web page. I would like to see a link to the Gutenberg edition and the date the item went into or will go into the public domain. I think some people will start to see the negative aspect of the long copyright times at the same time discovering how many documents are available from the Project. _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d