[posted] !!!Copyright issue: Re: Posted (#18346, McGuire and Piper) !

[Greg Newby]

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
> 
>    http://cocatalog.loc.gov/
> 
> 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]
> 
>