General Rules on Copyright

[DRT]

You may have seen this thread in which jdaw has quoted an extract from a book published many years ago. I think this is an excellent idea and would like to thank jdaw for the time he has spent typing this work so that others here can read it.

However, as is demonstrated in that thread, it may be difficult or impossible to obtain explicit permission from authors or publishers to do what jdaw has done. I therefore wondered if there are any general principles that we could stick to in terms of the works we reproduce here and the manner in which we credit them to the original owner. For example:

• are there any time bars on copyright for printed work?
• is the copyright status affected by whether or not the author is alive or dead?
• etc.

If there are no generally accepted circumstances that cover this, perhaps those who know most about the subject here could give us some generally safe principles to work within so that we don't do any obvious no-nos?

Derek

[RonnieRoots]

In a previous job I had quite a lot to do with copyright on plays. I'm not sure but I assume the rules are the same for other books. A play is free of copyright 73 or 74 (can't remember exactly) years after the death of the author. There is a catch in translations. Let's say a 19th century Portuguese book on port has been translated into English in the 1970's. The original is free of copyright, but the translation isn't.

[jdaw1]

For work by a human rather than a corporate author, in some countries the copyright lasts until 70 years after death of the author; in the US I think it is now 95.

But fair-comment quotation is allowed. To critique or review requires quotation. My guess, which was only a guess, was that a whole chapter was more than the fair-comment amount. Hence my seeking permission.

The permission received was not complete, but would protect me in court. I am not willfully stealing somebody’s work: I have sought permission, and received a no-objection semi-permission. We’re OK.

[JacobH]

This area of copyright law is rather complex because there are potential liabilities for the uploader; the owner of the server and the downloader, which may vary depending on the jurisdiction of each.

In the U.K., as jdaw1 mentioned, copyright on texts usually lasts the life-time of the author + 70 years, though editing/translating the text by a third party can have the effect of extending this. However, if an out-of-copyright work is published, unedited after the author’s death, there may also be copyright on the typographic arrangement of the works which is why retyping may be fine when photocopying may not.

Fair use is somewhat different in the UK to the US (and it’s also known as fair dealing, rather than fair use). The statute is not terribly helpful:

Criticism, review and news reporting

(1) Fair dealing with a work for the purpose of criticism or review, of that or another work or of a performance of a work, does not infringe any copyright in the work provided that it is accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement and provided that the work has been made available to the public.

though the courts appear to have generally interpreted “fair† as meaning “not costing the copyright holder anything in lost profits†. So, for instance, posting a page of a book for the purposes of criticism might be ok with acknowledgement, but if that page was (for instance) a list of all declared Port vintages, and the only reason someone would buy the book would be for that information, then there might be difficulties.