What a wonderful idea! I never would have thought of that. What was the term under Canadian rules before 1924? One source I find online says that the Canadian Copyright Act of 1875 had a term of 28 years. Even allowing one renewal period (as in the states), that could mean pre-1924 could be considered public domain in Canada, if the 1924 changes were not retroactive... However, this is of course, idle speculation. Hmm... I'm starting to wonder it would be beneficial to make the time to go look through microfilm of old newspapers from 1924 to see what they might have to say about this... I would recommend that anyone interested in Canadian copyright history take a look at an article I stumbled across while searching: A history of dramatic copyright and performance right in Canada to 1924. www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/TRIC/bin/get7.cgi?directory=vol22_2/&filename=oneill.html Andrew On Sat, 15 Jan 2005, Wallace J.McLean wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@rogers.com> Date: Saturday, January 15, 2005 4:57 pm Subject: RE: [PGCanada] Copyright clearance for PG Canada
If you assume the age at death could have been as high as 100 and the age at publishing as low as 12, you wind up with 1867.
90 years and 20 years gives 1885.
Anything that falls under this rule would be a shoo-in for PG USA, and it would be simplest to just post it there.
It would be nice to have it stored in a Canadian collection, though, too. But this will provide a good argument to policy-makers to give Canadians a failsafe rule, if 19th-century Canadiana has to be digitized in the US because of a lacuna in our own laws!
However, we may have a way out. We need to look at whether the 1924 term extension has ever been judicially commented on, and whether it's been found to be retroactive or not?
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