Public Domain fiction... need advice :)

[SteveK]

Hi all,

I'm looking for some advice and I reckon this forum probably has all the brains I need. I'm starting up a podcast and part of this project is reading public domain short fiction. I've had a few titles suggested to me and I've made up a list of works I'd like to do. This is where I need some help.

Most of the titles I've come across are in the public domain in the US or are available under a CC licence. As I'm based in Europe some titles may not be public domain here yet (although most seem to be). I was wondering what people on here think. If the servers are based in the US do I follow US public domain rules or do I follow the rules of the country I'm in?

Also, I was thinking that I would put a disclaimer, similar to that found on public domain archives, stating that whilst the work is in PD in the US users are advised to check there own countries legislation before downloading.

Any thoughts, advice or past experiences that may be helpful to me??

Thanks very much all,

SteveK

[Simon]

Well, the name who jumps up first above all others is Stanley Weinbaum....

Weinabum died in '36, and was for the year before his death the biggest name in short SF...  Asimov famously said something like "If Weinbaum hadn't died, John Campbell wouldn't have mattered"...

There's some absolutely fantastic stories in his archive, particularly A Martian Odyssey which is regularly listed along with Nightfall as the greatest short SF story ever (bit long for audio tho).

The problem with Weinbaum is his PD status is a little ambiguous...  US law puts all American IP from before 1924 as still reserved to the holders, which is why people like Lovecraft (70 years dead) haven't crossed over into the public domain yet.  His archive has been given to the libarary of Congress, and his collected works can be found on the Australian Project Gutenberg site, but unless you can find an unambiguous handover of his IP by his family then it's probably still reserved (although not enforced, whereas Lovecrafts IP is rigorously enforced by "Arkham House", bunch of bastards).

The problem you'll find is that, before Weinbaum, SF was pretty unsophisticated.  Unless you want to read out Frankenstein twenty times, you wont find anything worth using...

Weinbaum is unusual in that he wrote a LOT, in a very, very short time, then died almost immediately...  That would be perfect, and no one else is close, but personally I wouldn't risk it.

[Simon]

Hmm... I should have read more thoroughly.

You're asking about the internationalism of PD... I thought PD applied in the country of origin for the work, not in a general setting.  Thus an American work has the 1923 cutoff whatever applies in the EU.

It all gets a bit weird in Eastern Europe because the soviet block had VERY restrictive PD laws, and the EU has blanketed them all out with backdated laws...

Personally I'd post based on the country of origin, and wait for the lawsuits.

[SteveK]

Thanks Simon, lots to think about there.

My head really is in a spin over this whole issue. In Europe the general rule is 70 years after death unless the works have been placed into public domain early. In Australia and Canada its only 50 years. I wonder then how the Cthulhu cast can read The Call of Cthulhu without getting into hot water. Perhaps it's because they seem to be based in the UK and thus the 70 year rule may apply...

Some Weinbaum is on the US Gutenberg and Australian sites (although not the European site) so those works must have passed into PD. Gutenberg go to great lengths to ensure that they don't host material which isn't PD. It's a shame that it's such a pain to work out what is and isn't safe. There is some amazing work out there. I'm also looking at some creative commons pieces but I really would like to include some of my favorite old classics.

I came across this article http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/2007/10/23/canadian-public-domain-music-score-site-forced-to-remove-all-scores/ whilst trying to work this all out. It suggests that even though the work is PD in one country and hosted on servers in that country, putting it on the internet means it must abide by other nation's laws also. Which sounds kinda crazy. I keep thinking of the pirate bay and how their defense was the laws of the country (Sweden) in which the hosting servers were located.

Ow my head

[Heradel]

Basically, you're in for a word of mental hurt trying to figure this out. It changes per country, though there are a few treaties. Basically, the 18 hundreds and before, or Creative Commons are the only safe areas. You could start doing early SF in the previous Aughts and Teens, but with the Mickey Copyright system we have here you're in hot water.

The bitch of it is that we're going to be losing stories to time and obscurity due to people fearing to republish them. If you do it don't run ads, make sure you have no financial incentive and see if you can come up with something linking the podcast to a library or educational facility. I know a guy that was doing his best a few years ago to collect and put online old SF from the era you'd be trying to podcast and he got DMCA'd for his troubles, so be careful and don't make long term plans.

[sirana]

first: what Heradel said.

second: As far as I know the important location is not where the stuff is hosted, but where you are based. This is still something legal scholars are arguing about, so this is not really clear.
If I were you, I would stick to the pre-1923 rule for published work and author's death + 70 for unpublished and put up a disclaimer in the style you mentioned. While this doesn't get you completely in the clear, it should be reasonably safe and normally the worst you should expect is getting DMCA'd or get a cease and desist letter(at which time it is probably better to just delete the episode.) If you want to be completely in the clear use a story only if 1.) it is published before 1923 and 2.) author is dead for more than 70 years.

third: Get clear about the law about cease and desist letters in your country (I assume you live in Ireland). In Germany if you get a cease-and-desist letter (an so called "Abmahnung") and don't fight it you have to pay money to the lawyer you sent you the cease-and-desist, which is calculated according to the amount involved in the case, which in copyright matters is usually some absurdly high figure they clearly pulled out of their ass.

[sirana]

  US law puts all American IP from before 1924 as still reserved to the holders, which is why people like Lovecraft (70 years dead) haven't crossed over into the public domain yet. 

You probably mean "after 1924" instead of "before 1924".

[SteveK]

Thanks for the advice Sirana and Heradel. Looks like the pre-1923 seems to be the safe bet.

Just had a thought though...
As the US seems to have the longest term of copyright after death, I wonder if I would be safe enough with fiction published in America and in public domain according to reliable sources such as Project Gutenberg. If a work was published and copyrighted in America ( in a pulp magazine for example) then once the work entered PD in the US it would be very unlikely for it to be copyrighted elsewhere. There is obviously the possibility that the work might have been relaunched elsewhere since the American release but I could probably discover this by searching about the net. In this way I'm relying on Project Gutenberg's assessment of things but they know way more about PD than I ever will.

Sound reasonable?

Or maybe i'm just better off staying safe and sticking with the wealth of stuff available under a creative commons licence?

[eytanz]

Or maybe i'm just better off staying safe and sticking with the wealth of stuff available under a creative commons licence?

That may be trickier than it sounds; reading out a story would count as a derivative of the text story, so anything under a CC no-derivatives license (which my guess is a sizable majority of CC stories) would be out of your reach.

[Russell Nash]

Whatever you do I would include a big disclaimer right on the first page of your website.  It should say something like: "All stories are believed to be in the Public Domain.  If we are in error please send an email to editor@whatever.com."  It helps to demonstrate that you weren't trying to steal.

[Windup]

Not to denegrate the collective expertise of the forum, but the sum of all wisdom in legal matters is: "If you need real legal advice, talk to a real lawyer." 

As several have pointed out, this is an obscure, fast-moving, and heavily-litigated area right now.  You're liable to get smacked just because your case has certain characteristics that somebody wants to set a precident on, and there's the danger of getting caught in a much larger game.  (That can make a good novel plot, but like most novel plots, it sucks if it happens in your life.)

Anyway, you need somebody with experience in international copyright law.  Explain your situation (poor podcaster trying to do the right thing) and maybe a firm or individual will take you pro-bono for a couple hours, or at least not bill like you're Paramount Pictures. But, I'd definitely get real advice from a real lawyer before I stuck my foot in this.

Or, you could go the route of getting permission from the copyright holders.  That can be time-consuming and frustrating, but it is the one thing that is definitely always OK. 

[sirana]

Yeah, I know this thread is long dead and gone, but this is an excellent site to determine if a certain material is in the public domain. Great work by Peter B. Hirtle of Cornell University.

[goatkeeper]

Good site sirana- thanks for resurrecting this thread and for that helpful link.  I get depressed whenever I think about how much creativity is stifled because of absurd IP "protection".  I wonder if this cast has taken off yet?

[wintermute]

This might come in handy, too.

[Planish]

Check out http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/okbooks.html for summaries of and reference to copyright regs in many dozens of countries.

Note: some of the links at the bottom don't work, so you have to drill upwards in the directory structure by deleting parts of the end of the URLs