John et al.: Sorry for my long delay. Here is an explanation of why this item, and many like it, are in the public domain despite the serial reneweal. What we've discovered is that the renewals for Astounding (and the other pulp items we get a lot of our "rule 6" clearances for) only renewed the editorial content, not the stories. Rule 6 is at http://copy.pglaf.org We've received legal guidance that such renewals do not cover the stories. We speculate that usually copyrights were only granted to the publisher for the single use in the publication, therefore the serial publisher did not have standing to renew. We look separately for a renewal of the story, and in this case did not find one. There are some interesting variations on serial renewals, notably when such a publication is published or collected (often with a different story title) within a year or two of the serial publication. Our "rule 6" is designed to maximize the changes we will notice this, though in practice it can be hard to do. Let me know if this doesn't make sense to you. We've cleared many dozens of items like these, mostly from Astounding and Galaxy. This is mostly because we have volunteers with interests in sci fi. -- Greg On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 11:28:43AM -0400, John Mark Ockerbloom wrote:
There's a note on this file saying
"This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction, February and March, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright on this publication was renewed."
Copyrights were renewed for the February and March 1953 issues of Astounding in 1981. The February renewal is RE0000080694, the March renewal is RE0000080684. Both can be found in the Copyright Office database at
by doing a title search on "Astounding science fiction". When sorted by date in ascending order, they're currently hits 49 and 50.
Assuming that the renewal of a magazine issue covers the contents first published in it (absent a separate renewal for the individual item), it looks to me like this work is still under copyright. Does Gutenberg have evidence otherwise?
John
On 05/08/2006 07:53 AM, David Widger wrote:
Null-ABC, by Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire 18346 [Illustrator: van Dongen] [Link: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/8/3/4/18346 ] [Files: 18346.txt; 18346-8.txt; 18346-h.htm]